HPPS: A Hierarchical Progressive Perception System for Luggage Trolley Detection and Localization at Airports

• Main Authors: Sun, Zhirui, Zhang, Zhe, Zhao, Jieting, Ye, Hanjing, Wang, Jiankun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 08-05-2024
• Subjects: Computer Science - Robotics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2405.05514

The robotic autonomous luggage trolley collection system employs robots to
gather and transport scattered luggage trolleys at airports. However, existing
methods for detecting and locating these luggage trolleys often fail when they
are not fully visible. To address this, we introduce the Hierarchical
Progressive Perception System (HPPS), which enhances the detection and
localization of luggage trolleys under partial occlusion. The HPPS processes
the luggage trolley's position and orientation separately, which requires only
RGB images for labeling and training, eliminating the need for 3D coordinates
and alignment. The HPPS can accurately determine the position of the luggage
trolley with just one well-detected keypoint and estimate the luggage trolley's
orientation when it is partially occluded. Once the luggage trolley's initial
pose is detected, HPPS updates this information continuously to refine its
accuracy until the robot begins grasping. The experiments on detection and
localization demonstrate that HPPS is more reliable under partial occlusion
compared to existing methods. Its effectiveness and robustness have also been
confirmed through practical tests in actual luggage trolley collection tasks. A
website about this work is available at HPPS.