Robust Vision-only Mobile Robot Navigation with Topological Maps

In this work we present a novel system for autonomous mobile robot navigation. With only an omnidirectional camera as sensor, this system is able to build automatically and robust accurate topologically organised environment maps of a complex, natural environment. It can localise itself using that map at each moment, including both at startup (kidnapped robot) or using knowledge of former localisations. The topological nature of the map is similar to the intuitive maps humans use, is memory-efficient and enables fast and simple path planning towards a specified goal. We developed a real-time visual servoing technique to steer the system along the computed path. The key technology making this all possible is the novel fast wide baseline feature matching, which yields an efficient description of the scene, with a focus on man-made environments.

[1]  Stefan B. Williams,et al.  Reduced SIFT Features For Image Retrieval And Indoor Localisation , 2004 .

[2]  Tinne Tuytelaars,et al.  Fast wide baseline matching for visual navigation , 2004, CVPR 2004.

[3]  Emanuele Menegatti,et al.  Bayesian inference in the space of topological maps , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[4]  Cordelia Schmid,et al.  An Affine Invariant Interest Point Detector , 2002, ECCV.

[5]  Reid G. Simmons,et al.  Unsupervised learning of probabilistic models for robot navigation , 1996, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[6]  James R. Bergen,et al.  Visual odometry , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2004. CVPR 2004..

[7]  Arthur P. Dempster,et al.  Upper and Lower Probabilities Induced by a Multivalued Mapping , 1967, Classic Works of the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Belief Functions.

[8]  Hendrik Van Brussel,et al.  Shared Autonomy for Wheel Chair Control: Attempts to Assess the User's Autonomy , 2001, AMS.

[9]  Václav Hlaváč,et al.  MOTION ESTIMATION USING CENTRAL PANORAMIC CAMERAS , 1998 .

[10]  Robert C. Bolles,et al.  Random sample consensus: a paradigm for model fitting with applications to image analysis and automated cartography , 1981, CACM.

[11]  David G. Lowe,et al.  Object recognition from local scale-invariant features , 1999, Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.

[12]  Hendrik Van Brussel,et al.  Fine Motion Planning for Shared Wheelchair Control: Requirements and Preliminary Experiments , 2003 .

[13]  Domenico Prattichizzo,et al.  Epipole-Based Visual Servoing with Central Catadioptric Camera , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[14]  Reinhard Koch,et al.  Visual Modeling with a Hand-Held Camera , 2004, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[15]  Jiri Matas,et al.  Robust wide-baseline stereo from maximally stable extremal regions , 2004, Image Vis. Comput..

[16]  Ioannis T. Christou,et al.  Design and development issues for ARCHEOGUIDE: An Augmented Reality based cultural heritage on-site guide , 2001 .

[17]  Robert M. Haralick,et al.  Review and analysis of solutions of the three point perspective pose estimation problem , 1994, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[18]  Ben J. A. Kröse,et al.  Lino, the User-Interface Robot , 2003, EUSAI.

[19]  Luc Van Gool,et al.  Wide Baseline Stereo Matching based on Local, Affinely Invariant Regions , 2000, BMVC.

[20]  Ehud Rivlin,et al.  Visual homing: Surfing on the epipoles , 1997, Block Island Workshop on Vision and Control.

[21]  Ales Leonardis,et al.  Panoramic Eigenimages for Spatial Localisation , 1999, CAIP.

[22]  Wesley H. Huang,et al.  Loop Closing in Topological Maps , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[23]  Leslie Pack Kaelbling,et al.  Learning Topological Maps with Weak Local Odometric Information , 1997, IJCAI.

[24]  Anil K. Jain.  Fundamentals of Digital Image Processing , 2018, Control of Color Imaging Systems.

[25]  Jana Kosecka,et al.  Global localization and relative pose estimation based on scale-invariant features , 2004, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2004. ICPR 2004..

[26]  Luc Van Gool,et al.  Feature based omnidirectional sparse visual path following , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[27]  Reinhard Koch,et al.  Matching of affinely invariant regions for visual servoing , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.99CH36288C).

[28]  Andrew J. Davison,et al.  Real-time simultaneous localisation and mapping with a single camera , 2003, Proceedings Ninth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.

[29]  Richard I. Hartley,et al.  Estimation of Relative Camera Positions for Uncalibrated Cameras , 1992, ECCV.

[30]  David G. Lowe,et al.  Local and global localization for mobile robots using visual landmarks , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Expanding the Societal Role of Robotics in the the Next Millennium (Cat. No.01CH37180).

[31]  Heinrich H. Bülthoff,et al.  Navigating through a virtual city: Using virtual reality technology to study human action and perception , 1998, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[32]  Katsuhiko Sakaue,et al.  Real-time camera parameter estimation from images for a mixed reality system , 2000, Proceedings 15th International Conference on Pattern Recognition. ICPR-2000.

[33]  T. S. Collett,et al.  Landmark maps for honeybees , 1987, Biological Cybernetics.

[34]  Josechu J. Guerrero,et al.  Visual correction for mobile robot homing , 2005, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[35]  Luc Van Gool,et al.  Recognizing color patterns irrespective of viewpoint and illumination , 1999, Proceedings. 1999 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (Cat. No PR00149).

[36]  Bernhard Schölkopf,et al.  Where did I take that snapshot? Scene-based homing by image matching , 1998, Biological Cybernetics.

[37]  Edsger W. Dijkstra,et al.  A note on two problems in connexion with graphs , 1959, Numerische Mathematik.

[38]  Sunil Arya,et al.  An optimal algorithm for approximate nearest neighbor searching fixed dimensions , 1998, JACM.

[39]  Adam Baumberg,et al.  Reliable feature matching across widely separated views , 2000, Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2000 (Cat. No.PR00662).

[40]  Glenn Shafer,et al.  A Mathematical Theory of Evidence , 2020, A Mathematical Theory of Evidence.

[41]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Incremental robot mapping with fingerprints of places , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[42]  Carlo Tomasi,et al.  Good features to track , 1994, 1994 Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[43]  Ales Leonardis,et al.  Robust localization using panoramic view-based recognition , 2000, Proceedings 15th International Conference on Pattern Recognition. ICPR-2000.

[44]  Han Wang,et al.  Appearance-based topological Bayesian inference for loop-closing detection in cross-country environment , 2005, IROS.

[45]  Ben J. A. Kröse,et al.  Hierarchical map building using visual landmarks and geometric constraints , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[46]  Illah R. Nourbakhsh,et al.  Appearance-based place recognition for topological localization , 2000, Proceedings 2000 ICRA. Millennium Conference. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Symposia Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37065).

[47]  Hendrik Van Brussel,et al.  A Robotic Assistant for Ambient Intelligent Meeting Rooms , 2003, EUSAI.

[48]  Jun Rekimoto,et al.  CyberCode: designing augmented reality environments with visual tags , 2000, DARE '00.

[49]  Daniel G. Aliaga.  Accurate catadioptric calibration for real-time pose estimation in room-size environments , 2001, Proceedings Eighth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. ICCV 2001.

[50]  Kostas Daniilidis,et al.  Mirrors in motion: epipolar geometry and motion estimation , 2003, Proceedings Ninth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.