Visual topological map building in self-similar environments. (English) Zbl 1188.93063

Goedemé, Toon; Tuytelaars, Tinne; Van Gool, Luc

Andrade Cetto, Juan (ed.) et al., Informatics in control automation and robotics. Selected papers from the international conference on informatics in control automation and robotics 2006 (ICINCO), Setúbal, Portugal, August 1–5, 2006. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-540-79141-6/hbk). Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering 15, 195-205 (2008).

Summary: This chapter describes a method to automatically build topological maps for robot navigation out of a sequence of visual observations taken from a camera mounted on the robot. This direct non-metrical approach relies completely on the detection of loop closings, i.e. repeated visitations of one particular place. In natural environments, visual loop closing can be very hard, for two reasons. Firstly, the environment at one place can look differently at different time instances due to illumination changes and viewpoint differences. Secondly, there can be different places that look alike, i.e. the environment is self-similar. Here we propose a method that combines state-of-the-art visual comparison techniques and evidence collection based on Dempster-Shafer probability theory to tackle this problem.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1146.93003].

MSC:

93C85	Automated systems (robots, etc.) in control theory
93E03	Stochastic systems in control theory (general)
62H30	Classification and discrimination; cluster analysis (statistical aspects)

Keywords:

mobile robot navigation; topological map building; omnidirectional vision; Dempster-Shafer theory