Visual correction for mobile robot homing

We present a method to send a mobile robot to locations specified by images previously taken from these positions, which sometimes has been referred as homing. Classically this has been carried out using the fundamental matrix, but the fundamental matrix is ill conditioned with planar scenes, which are quite usual in man made environments. Many times in robot homing, small baseline images with high disparity due to rotation are compared, where the fundamental matrix also gives bad results. We use a monocular vision system and we compute motion through an homography obtained from automatically matched lines. In this work we compare the use of the homography and the fundamental matrix and we propose the correction of motion directly from the parameters of the 2D homography, which only needs one calibration parameter. It is shown that it is robust, sufficiently accurate and simple.