An optical tracking system based on hybrid stereo/single-view registration and controlled cameras

Optical tracking is widely used in robotics applications such as unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) localization. Unfortunately, such systems require many cameras and are, consequently, expensive. In this paper, we propose an approach to considerably increase the optical tracking volume without adding cameras. First, when the target becomes no longer visible by at least two cameras we propose a single-view tracking mode which requires only one camera. Furthermore, we propose to rely on controlled cameras able to track the UAV all around the volume to provide 6DoF tracking data through multi-view registration. This is achieved by using a visual servoing scheme. The two methods can be combined in order to maximize the tracking volume. We propose a proof-of-concept of such an optical tracking system based on two consumer-grade cameras and a pan-tilt actuator and we used this approach on UAV localization.