Omnidirectional Distributed Vision System for a Team of Heterogeneous Robots

This paper presents a system designed to cooperatively track and share the information about moving objects using a multi-robot team. Every robot of the team is fitted with a different omnidirectional vision system running at different frame rates. The information gathered from every robot is broadcast to all the other robots and every robot fuses its own measurements with the information received from the teammates, building its own "vision of the world". The cooperation of the vision sensors enhances the capabilities of the single vision sensor. This work was implemented in the RoboCup domain, using our team of heterogeneous robot, but the approach is very general and can be used in any application where a team of robot has to track multiple objects. The system is designed to work with heterogeneous vision systems both in the camera design and in computational resources. Experiments in real game scenarios are presented.