Mobile robot navigation based on vision and DGPS information

Abstract

This paper describes a navigation system for an autonomous mobile robot in outdoor environments. The robot uses vision to detect landmarks and differential GPS (DGPS) information to determine robot's initial position and orientation. The vision system detects landmarks in the environment by referring to an environment model. As the robot moves, it estimates its position by conventional dead-reckoning, and matches the landmarks with the environment model in order to reduce the error in the robot position estimate. The robot initial position and orientation are calculated from the coordinate values of the first and second locations which are acquired by DGPS. Subsequent orientations and positions are derived from map matching. We implemented the system on a mobile robot "Harunobu-6". Experimental results in real environments showed the effectiveness of our proposed navigation methods.