Indoor Navigation of a Wheeled Mobile Robot along Visual Routes

— When navigating in an unknown environment for the first time, a natural behavior consists in memorizing some key views along the performed path, in order to use these references as checkpoints for a future navigation mission taking a similar path. This assumption is used in this paper as the basis of a navigation framework for wheeled mobile robots in indoor environments. During a human-guided teleoperated learning step, the robot performs paths which are sampled and stored as a set of ordered key images, acquired by a standard embedded camera. The set of these obtained visual paths is topologically organized and provides a visual memory of the environment. Given an image of one of the visual paths as a target, the robot navigation mission is defined as a concatenation of visual path subsets, called visual route. When running autonomously, the robot is controlled by a visual servoing law adapted to its nonholonomic constraint. Based on the regulation of successive homographies, t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Guillaume Le Blanc, Youcef Mezouar, Philippe Martinet
• Keywords: ICRA 2005, Navigation Mission, Robot, Robotics, Visual Path