Authors:
Sotirios Ch. Diamantas
1
;
Anastasios Oikonomidis
2
and
Richard M. Crowder
1
Affiliations:
1
School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton, United Kingdom
;
2
School of Management and University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Keyword(s):
Optical flow, Biologically inspired robot navigation, Robot homing, Visual navigation, Mobile robotics.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Image and Video Analysis
;
Motion, Tracking and Stereo Vision
;
Statistical Approach
;
Visual Navigation
;
Visually Guided Robotics
Abstract:
In this paper a novel biologically inspired method is addressed for the robot homing problem where a robot returns to its home position after having explored an a priori unknown environment. The method exploits the optical flow patterns of the landmarks and based on a training data set a probability is inferred between the current snapshot and the snapshots stored in memory. Optical flow, which is not a property of landmarks like color, shape, and size but a property of the camera motion, is used for navigating a robot back to its home
position. In addition, optical flow is the only information provided to the system while parameters like position and velocity of the robot are not known. Our method proves to be effective even when the snapshots of the landmarks have been taken from varying distances and velocities.