Virtual immersive environments or telepresence setups often consist of multiple cameras that have to be calibrated. We present a convenient method for doing this. The minimum is three cameras, but there is no upper limit. The method is fully automatic and a freely moving bright spot is the only calibration object. A set of virtual 3D points is made by waving the bright spot through the working volume. Its projections are found with subpixel precision and verified by a robust RANSAC analysis. The cameras do not have to see all points; only reasonable overlap between camera subgroups is necessary. Projective structures are computed via rank-4 factorization and the Euclidean stratification is done by imposing geometric constraints. This linear estimate initializes a postprocessing computation of nonlinear distortion, which is also fully automatic. We suggest a trick on how to use a very ordinary laser pointer as the calibration object. We show that it is possible to calibrate an immersive virtual environment with 16 cameras in less than 60 minutes reaching about 1/5 pixel reprojection error. The method has been successfully tested on numerous multicamera environments using varying numbers of cameras of varying quality.

Abstract-We propose a learning approach to tracking explicitly minimizing the computational complexity of the tracking process subject to user-defined probability of failure (loss-of-lock) and precision. The tracker is formed by a Number of Sequences of Learned Linear Predictors (NoSLLiP). Robustness of NoSLLiP is achieved by modeling the object as a collection of local motion predictorsobject motion is estimated by the outlier-tolerant RANSAC algorithm from local predictions. The efficiency of the NoSLLiP tracker stems 1) from the simplicity of the local predictors and 2) from the fact that all design decisions, the number of local predictors used by the tracker, their computational complexity (i.e., the number of observations the prediction is based on), locations as well as the number of RANSAC iterations, are all subject to the optimization (learning) process. All time-consuming operations are performed during the learning stage-tracking is reduced to only a few hundred integer multiplications in each step. On PC with 1xK8 3200+, a predictor evaluation requires about 30 s. The proposed approach is verified on publicly available sequences with approximately 12,000 frames with ground truth. Experiments demonstrate superiority in frame rates and robustness with respect to the SIFT detector, Lucas-Kanade tracker, and other trackers.

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The paper describes experience with applying a user-centric design methodology in developing systems for human-robot teaming in Urban Search and Rescue. A human-robot team consists of several semi-autonomous robots (rovers/UGVs, microcopter/UAVs), several humans at an off-site command post (mission commander, UGV operators) and one on-site human (UAV operator). This system has been developed in close cooperation with several rescue organizations, and has been deployed in a real-life tunnel accident use case. The human-robot team jointly explores an accident site, communicating using a multi-modal team interface, and spoken dialogue. The paper describes the development of this complex socio-technical system per se, as well as recent experience in evaluating the performance of this system

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This paper describes our experience in designing, developing and deploying systems for supporting human-robot teams during disaster response. It is based on R&D performed in the EU-funded project NIFTi. NIFTi aimed at building intelligent, collaborative robots that could work together with humans in exploring a disaster site, to make a situational assessment. To achieve this aim, NIFTi addressed key scientific design aspects in building up situation awareness in a human-robot team, developing systems using a user-centric methodology involving end users throughout the entire R&D cycle, and regularly deploying implemented systems under real-life circumstances for experimentation and testing. This has yielded substantial scientific advances in the state-of-the-art in robot mapping, robot autonomy for operating in harsh terrain, collaborative planning, and human-robot interaction. NIFTi deployed its system in actual disaster response activities in Northern Italy, in July 2012, aiding in structure damage assessment.

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