Following the leader using a tracking system based on pre-trained deep neural networks

In this work, we present a software architecture to solve, at some level, the follow the leader problem. This problem consists of an autonomous vehicle trying to track and follow a leader vehicle. To track the leader position in consecutive camera images, we employed the Generic Object Tracking Using Regression Networks (GOTURN). GOTURN is a pre-trained Deep Neural Network capable of tracking generic objects, without application-specific training or fine-tuning. The proposed software architecture was evaluated using a real autonomous vehicle, in four stretches of a University ring road. In all experiments, the autonomous vehicle was able to follow the leader's path with maximum root mean square error of 0.28m.