Appearance-based navigation and homing for autonomous mobile robot

In this paper, we develop an algorithm for navigating a mobile robot using the visual potential. The visual potential is computed from an image sequence and optical flow computed from successive images captured by a camera mounted on the robot, that is, the visual potential for navigation is computed from appearances of the workspace observed as an image sequence. The direction to the destination is provided at the initial position of the robot. The robot dynamically selects a local pathway to the destination without collision with obstacles and without any knowledge of the robot workspace. Furthermore, the guidance algorithm to destination allows the mobile robot to return from the destination to the initial position. We present the experimental results of navigation and homing in synthetic and real environments.

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► We propose a visual potential for visual navigation of robot.
► The visual potential field on an image is an approximation of a repulsion force.
► The free space for navigation is computed from optical flow.
► The method derives a features navigation method.