Object Pose Estimation Annotation Pipeline for Multi-view Monocular Camera Systems in Industrial Settings

Object localization, and more specifically object pose estimation, in large industrial spaces such as warehouses and production facilities, is essential for material flow operations. Traditional approaches rely on artificial artifacts installed in the environment or excessively expensive equipment, that is not suitable at scale. A more practical approach is to utilize existing cameras in such spaces in order to address the underlying pose estimation problem and to localize objects of interest. In order to leverage state-of-the-art methods in deep learning for object pose estimation, large amounts of data need to be collected and annotated. In this work, we provide an approach to the annotation of large datasets of monocular images without the need for manual labor. Our approach localizes cameras in space, unifies their location with a motion capture system, and uses a set of linear mappings to project 3D models of objects of interest at their ground truth 6D pose locations. We test our pipeline on a custom dataset collected from a system of eight cameras in an industrial setting that mimics the intended area of operation. Our approach was able to provide consistent quality annotations for our dataset with 26, 482 object instances at a fraction of the time required by human annotators.

Semi-Automated Computer Vision based Tracking of Multiple Industrial Entities -- A Framework and Dataset Creation Approach

This contribution presents the TOMIE framework (Tracking Of Multiple Industrial Entities), a framework for the continuous tracking of industrial entities (e.g., pallets, crates, barrels) over a network of, in this example, six RGB cameras. This framework, makes use of multiple sensors, data pipelines and data annotation procedures, and is described in detail in this contribution. With the vision of a fully automated tracking system for industrial entities in mind, it enables researchers to efficiently capture high quality data in an industrial setting. Using this framework, an image dataset, the TOMIE dataset, is created, which at the same time is used to gauge the framework's validity. This dataset contains annotation files for 112,860 frames and 640,936 entity instances that are captured from a set of six cameras that perceive a large indoor space. This dataset out-scales comparable datasets by a factor of four and is made up of scenarios, drawn from industrial applications from the sector of warehousing. Three tracking algorithms, namely ByteTrack, Bot-Sort and SiamMOT are applied to this dataset, serving as a proof-of-concept and providing tracking results that are comparable to the state of the art.

Distributed Timed Elastic Band (DTEB) Planner: Trajectory Sharing and Collision Prediction for Multi-Robot Systems

Autonomous navigation of mobile robots is a well studied problem in robotics. However, the navigation task becomes challenging when multi-robot systems have to cooperatively navigate dynamic environments with deadlock-prone layouts. We present a Distributed Timed Elastic Band (DTEB) Planner that combines Prioritized Planning with the online TEB trajectory Planner, in order to extend the capabilities of the latter to multi-robot systems. The proposed planner is able to reactively avoid imminent collisions as well as predictively resolve potential deadlocks among a team of robots, while navigating in a complex environment. The results of our simulation demonstrate the reliable performance and the versatility of the planner in different environment settings. The code and tests for our approach are available online.