Local homing navigation based on the moment model for landmark distribution and features

Abstract

For local homing navigation, an agent is supposed to return home based on the surrounding environmental information. According to the snapshot model, the home snapshot and the current view are compared to determine the homing direction. In this paper, we propose a novel homing navigation method using the moment model. The suggested moment model also follows the snapshot theory to compare the home snapshot and the current view, but the moment model defines a moment of landmark inertia as the sum of the product of the feature of the landmark particle with the square of its distance. The method thus uses range values of landmarks in the surrounding view and the visual features. The center of the moment can be estimated as the reference point, which is the unique convergence point in the moment potential from any view. The homing vector can easily be extracted from the centers of the moment measured at the current position and the home location. The method effectively guides homing direction in real environments, as well as in the simulation environment. In this paper, we take a holistic approach to use all pixels in the panoramic image as landmarks and use the RGB color intensity for the visual features in the moment model in which a set of three moment functions is encoded to determine the homing vector. We also tested visual homing or the moment model with only visual features, but the suggested moment model with both the visual feature and the landmark distance shows superior performance. We demonstrate homing performance with various methods classified by the status of the feature, the distance and the coordinate alignment.