VISION GUIDED CIRCUMNAVIGATING AUTONOMOUS ROBOTS

Abstract

We present a system for vision guided autonomous circumnavigation, allowing a mobile robot to navigate safely around objects of arbitrary pose, and avoid obstacles. The system performs model-based object recognition from an intensity image. By enabling robots to recognize and navigate with respect to particular objects, this system empowers robots to perform deterministic actions on specific objects, rather than general exploration and navigation as emphasized in much of the current literature. This paper describes a fully integrated system, and, in particular, introduces canonical-views. Further, we derive a direct algebraic method for finding object pose and position for the four-dimensional case of a ground-based robot with uncalibrated vertical movement of its camera. Vision for mobile robots can be treated as a very different problem to traditional computer vision, as mobile robots have a characteristic perspective, and there is a causal relation between robot actions and view changes. Canonical-views are a novel, active object representation designed specifically to take advantage of the constraints of the robot navigation problem to allow efficient recognition and navigation.