Safety-First Tracker: A Trajectory Planning Framework for Omnidirectional Robot Tracking

This paper introduces a Safety-First Tracker (SF-Tracker) designed for omnidirectional autonomous tracking robots. The position and orientation of omnidirectional robots are decoupled for stepwise planning to ensure trajectory safety and maintain target visibility. SF-Tracker puts the trajectory safety in the first place. First, a collision-free and occlusion-free reference path is efficiently initialized by constructing a directed weighted graph. By building upon this path, safe trajectory optimization is implemented to ensure safe movement. Finally, an orientation planner is developed to achieve target visibility based on the safe trajectory. Extensive experimental evaluations in simulated environments and the real world demonstrate that the SF-Tracker outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms trajectory safety and target visibility. Ablation experiments further demonstrate the significance of each step of the SF-Tracker. The source code and demonstration video can be found at https://github.com/Yue-0/SF-Tracker.