Appearance contrast for fast, robust trail-following

— We describe a framework for finding and tracking “trails” for autonomous outdoor robot navigation. Through a combination of visual cues and ladar-derived structural information, the algorithm is able to follow paths which pass through multiple zones of terrain smoothness, border vegetation, tread material, and illumination conditions. Our shape-based visual trail tracker assumes that the approaching trail region is approximately triangular under perspective. It generates region hypotheses from a learned distribution of expected trail width and curvature variation, and scores them using a robust measure of color and brightness contrast with flanking regions. The structural component analogously rewards hypotheses which correspond to empty or low-density regions in a groundstrike-filtered ladar obstacle map. Our system’s performance is analyzed on several long sequences with diverse appearance and structural characteristics. Ground-truth segmentations are used to quantify pe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Christopher Rasmussen, Yan Lu, Mehmet Kocamaz
• Keywords: Autonomous Outdoor Robot, IROS 2009, Ladar-derived Structural Information, Robotics, Shape-based Visual Trail