  During the evacuation of a building, the rapid and accurate tracking of human
evacuees can be used by a guide robot to increase the effectiveness of the
evacuation [1],[2]. This paper introduces a near real-time human position
tracking solution tailored for evacuation robots. Using a pose detector, our
system first identifies human joints in the camera frame in near real-time and
then translates the position of these pixels into real-world coordinates via a
simple calibration process. We run multiple trials of the system in action in
an indoor lab environment and show that the system can achieve an accuracy of
0.55 meters when compared to ground truth. The system can also achieve an
average of 3 frames per second (FPS) which was sufficient for our study on
robot-guided human evacuation. The potential of our approach extends beyond
mere tracking, paving the way for evacuee motion prediction, allowing the robot
to proactively respond to human movements during an evacuation.
