Neural Network Based Ball Tracking for Robot Nao

This paper is focused on the problem of tracking an object by the head movement of robot with two cameras simultaneously, one robot camera and one fixed external camera. The goal of using external camera is to test, how it can aid the head camera of robot when the object moves out of its field of view. The setup of system is focused on comparison of robot with and without additional camera. The tracked object is a simple pink ball and the tracking mechanism is a simple multilayer perceptron with the backpropagation algorithm. The mechanism of tracking is not to shift the coordinates of moving object on fixed scene, but actually to turn the head of robot to have the object in the center of scene, like with a human tracking some object. In the paper we provide details of setup of working system, with results and parameters, which can be used as a starting point for similar experiments. Actually, the training set construction is important for this type of robotic tracking, please see details in the paper. The system is working. We believe, it is easy to repeat our results, and the effect of added camera can be demonstrated.