Visual Planning for Autonomous Mobile Robot Navigation

For autonomous mobile robots following a planned path, self-localization is a very important task. Cumulative errors derived from the different noisy sensors make it absolutely necessary. Absolute robot localization is commonly made measuring relative distance from the robot to previously learnt landmarks on the environment. Landmarks could be interest points, colored objects, or rectangular regions as posters or emergency signs, which are very useful and not intrusive beacons in human environments. This paper presents an active localization method: a visual planning function selects from a free collision path and a set of planar landmarks, a subset of visible landmarks and the best combination of camera parameters (pan, tilt and zoom) for positions sampled along the path. A visibility measurement and some utility measurements were defined in order to select for each position, the camera modality and the subset of landmarks that maximize these local criteria. Finally, a dynamic programming method is proposed in order to minimize saccadic movements all over the trajectory.