Robot-Relay : Building-Wide, Calibration-Less Visual Servoing with Learned Sensor Handover Network

Abstract: We present a system which grows and manages a network of remote viewpoints during the natural installation cycle for a newly installed camera network or a newly deployed robot fleet. No explicit notion of camera position or orientation is required, neither global - i.e. relative to a building plan - nor local - i.e. relative to an interesting point in a room. Furthermore, no metric relationship between viewpoints is required. Instead, we leverage our prior work in effective remote control without extrinsic or intrinsic calibration and extend it to the multi-camera setting. In this, we memorise, from simultaneous robot detections in the tracker thread, soft pixel-wise topological connections between viewpoints. We demonstrate our system with repeated autonomous traversals of workspaces connected by a network of six cameras across a productive office environment.