Omnidirectional Vision Based Topological Navigation

Abstract. In this work we present a novel system for autonomous mobile robot navigation. With only an omnidirectional camera as sensor, this system is able to build automatically and robustly accurate topologically organised environment maps of a complex, natural environment. It can localise itself using such a map at each moment, including both at startup (kidnapped robot) or using knowledge of former localisations. The topological nature of the map is similar to the intuitive maps humans use, is memory-efficient and enables fast and simple path planning towards a specified goal. We developed a real-time visual servoing technique to steer the system along the computed path. A key technology making this all possible is the novel fast wide baseline feature matching, which yields an efficient description of the scene, with a focus on man-made environments.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: IJCV
• Authors: Toon Goedemé, Marnix Nuttin, Tinne Tuytelaars, Luc J. Van Gool
• Keywords: Autonomous Mobile Robot, IJCV 2007, Omnidirectional Camera, Real-time Visual Servoing