Small-footprint mobile ground robots, such as the popular Turtlebot and Kobuki platforms, are by necessity equipped with sensors which lie close to the ground. Reliably detecting and tracking people from this viewpoint is a challenging problem, whose solution is a key requirement for many applications involving sharing of common spaces and close human-robot interaction. Here you can find a robust solution for cluttered indoor environments, using an inexpensive RGB-D sensor such as the Microsoft Kinect or Asus Xtion. A MATLAB real-time ROS-enabled implementation is available on this git repository.
Please refer to the following publications describing our system.
Kinect-based People Detection and Tracking from Small-Footprint Ground Robots
A. Pesenti Gritti, O. Tarabini, J. Guzzi, G. A. Di Caro, V. Caglioti, L. M. Gambardella, A. Giusti
In Proc. International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2014. [preprint PDF]
Bibtex:
@incollection{pesentigritti2014a,
booktitle={Proc. International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2014},
title={Kinect-based People Detection and Tracking from Small-Footprint Ground Robots},
author={Armando Pesenti Gritti and Oscar Tarabini and Jerome Guzzi and Gianni A. Di Caro and Vincenzo Caglioti and Luca M. Gambardella and Alessandro Giusti}
}
Video: Perceiving People from a Low-Lying Viewpoint
A. Pesenti Gritti, O. Tarabini, A. Giusti, J. Guzzi, G. A. Di Caro, V. Caglioti, L. M. Gambardella
In Proc. Human Robot Interaction (HRI) 2014. [1-page abstract PDF (preprint)]
Bibtex:
@incollection{pesentigritti2014b,
booktitle={Proc. Human Robot Interaction (HRI) 2014},
title={Video: Perceiving People from a Low-lying Viewpoint},
author={Armando Pesenti Gritti and Oscar Tarabini and Alessandro Giusti and Jerome Guzzi and Gianni A. Di Caro and Vincenzo Caglioti and Luca M. Gambardella}
}
The system is implemented in MATLAB, with the most computationally expensive tasks written as mex functions able to exploit multi-core CPUs thanks to OpenMP support.
The implementation has been tested under Mac OSX and Ubuntu Linux. In order to build and use the system, the following are required:
- MATLAB (tested on R2011b and R2013a)
- gcc compiler (version 4.7 or greater)
- OpenNI 1.5 (not compatible with OpenNI 2)
Compile mex functions from an OS terminal with the following command: MATLABDIR="/path/to/matlab" OPENNIDIR="/path/to/openni/include" make.
Where "/path/to/matlab" is the MATLAB root directory, and where "/path/to/openni/include" is the OpenNI headers directory (e.g. on Ubuntu it is typically "/usr/include/ni/").
(Note: For some linux distribution you may have linking problems with libstdc++, that will result in an error message when running the code: in this case, force matlab to compile using libstdc++ of your system and not its own version. One way to do so is to temporarily make the symbolic link in MATLABDIR/sys/os/ARCH/libstdc++.so.* to point to the system libstdc++ (typically under /usr/lib)).
Up to this stage you can use the system:
- live: with an OpenNI compatible RGB-D sensor (tested with Microsft Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro Live), directly connected to computer where the system is running.
- recorded videos: with ".oni" files, previously recorded with an RGB-D sensor.
If you want to integrate the system in a ROS environment, reading sensor data on the topics "/camera/depth_registered/image_raw" and "/camera/rgb/image_raw", reading odometry data on the topic "/odom" and publishing the traked people on the topic "/people" with message type "people_msg/People", you need to perform the following additional steps:
- copy the entire people_msg directory into your
ROS_PACKAGE_PATH - cd to
ROS_PACKAGE_PATH - build the package with
rosmake people_msg
(Note: the ROS MATLAB BRIDGE used by our system needs an updated version of the "google-collect.jar" library. It's necessary to replace the file MATLABDIR/java/jarext/google-collect.jar with the file that can be downloaded http://search.maven.org/remotecontent?filepath=com/google/guava/guava/13.0.1/guava-13.0.1.jar", renaming it from "guava-13.0.1.jar" to "google-collect.jar" and copying it to MATLABDIR/java/jarext/ directory).
The files in the direcotry examples contain detailed explanations about the usage of the system with the various source type. To obtain more information about a particular function use the MATLAB command help.
Testing datasets, qualitative results and more details about the system are available at bit.ly/perceivingpeople.