Two years ago, I attended a robot contest, in which one of the missions required the robot to follow the pedestrian to complete the task. At that time, I used their demo program to complete the task. Not long after, I found two main issues:
1. The program follows the closest point read by the depth camera, which if I walk close to a wall next to, the robot may likely ‘follow’ the wall.
2. Not to mention if another pedestrian crosses between the robot and the target.
Regarding these two issues, I decided to improve it.
We’ve designed a procedure of using YOLO Object Detection and Person re-identification to re-identify the target for continuous following.