Visual servoing and appearance for navigation

Abstract

We address the problem of visual-based navigation of a mobile robot in indoors environments. The robot control system is based on a single camera to provide the required visual feedback information. The control strategy merges two distinct paradigms that appeared recently in the technical literature, in order to provide the robustness and computation speed needed for closed loop control. On one hand, we servo on the vanishing point defined by the intersection of the corridor guidelines. This mode is used for the heading control and ensures that the vehicle moves along corridors. On the other hand, we use appearance-based processes to monitor the robot position along the path and to launch different navigation tasks (e.g. turn left, enter door, etc.). The combination of visual servoing techniques that provide stable control loops for specific local tasks, and appearance-based methods that embed a representation of the environment at a larger scale, results in extended autonomy even with modest computational resources. Preliminary tests have shown encouraging results, as discussed in the paper.