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Omnidirectional Vision Based Topological Navigation

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ESAT - PSI - VISICS, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Toon Goedemé

  2. PMA, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Marnix Nuttin

  3. ESAT - PSI - VISICS, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Tinne Tuytelaars

  4. ESAT - PSI - VISICS, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Luc Van Gool

  5. BIWI, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

    Luc Van Gool

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  1. Toon Goedemé
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  2. Marnix Nuttin
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  3. Tinne Tuytelaars
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  4. Luc Van Gool
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Correspondence to Toon Goedemé.

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Goedemé, T., Nuttin, M., Tuytelaars, T. et al. Omnidirectional Vision Based Topological Navigation. Int J Comput Vision 74, 219–236 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-006-0025-9

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