A virtual simulation of the image based self-navigation of mobile robots

Abstract

The paper concerns with the problem of fully visual selfnavigation of mobile robots based on the analysis of similarity of images, acquired by the cameras mounted on the robot, with some previously captured images stored in a database. In order to simplify and speed-up the extraction of the necessary data from the image database it is assumed that the rough position of the robot is known e.g. based on the GPS module or some other sensors. Due to the application of the image analysis methods, the accuracy of the self-positioning of the robot can be significantly improved leading to fully visual self-navigation of autonomous mobile robots, assuming their continuous access to the image database. In order to verify the validity of the proposed approach, the virtual simulation environment based on the Simbad 3D robot simulator has been prepared. The initial results presented in the paper, obtained for synthetic images captured by the virtual robots, confirm the usefulness of the proposed approach being a good starting point for future experiments using the real images captured by the physical mobile robot also in various lighting conditions.