Model-based vision system for mobile robot position estimation

The development of an autonomous mobile robot is a central problem in artificial intelligence and robotics. A vision system can be used to recognize naturally occurring landmarks located in known positions. The problem considered here is that of finding the location and orientation of a mobile robot using a 3-D image taken by a CCD camera located on the robot. The naturally occurring landmarks that we use are the corners of the room extracted by an edge detection algorithm from a 2-D image of the indoor scene. Then, the location and orientation of the vehicle are calculated by perspective information of the landmarks in the scene of the room where the robot moves.