Automated tracking and real time following of moving person for robotics applications

Presently the interaction of robots with human plays an important role in various social applications. Reliable tracking is an important aspect for the social robots where robots need to follow the moving person. This paper proposes the implementation of automated tracking and real time following algorithm for robotic automation. Occlusion and identity retention are the major challenges in the tracking process. Hence, a feature set based identity retention algorithm is used and integrated with robot operating system. The tracking algorithm is implemented using robot operating system in Linux and using OpenCV. The tracking algorithm achieved 85% accuracy and 72.30% precision. Further analysis of tracking algorithm corresponds to the integration of ROS and OpenCV is presented. The analysis of tracking algorithm concludes that ROS linking required 0.64% more time in comparison with simple OpenCV code based tracking algorithm.