T-Net for navigating a vision-guided robot in a real world

Abstract

This paper presents an environmental representation, called T-Net (Target Network), for robot navigation. This representation navigates a mobile robot to move in real time in an unstructured environment. The robot approximates local areas with straight paths and memorizes the paths with pairs of feature points. The T-Net consisting of the paths represents rigid environmental structure and keeps relations between the local areas. By tracking the feature points, the robot can move along the T-Net and investigate the environment in detail. The authors have applied this idea to their mobile robot which has multiple vision agents, and verified it through simulations and experimentations in a real world.