Robust appearance based visual route following in large scale outdoor environments

Abstract

Route following is defined as the ability to repeat the same route after having traversed it once under the control of a human operator. This paper presents a fast and robust appearance based route following algorithm that utilises only monocular panoramic vision and odometry in large scale outdoor environments. Extensive experimental results have shown robustness against lighting variations and occlusion not yet demonstrated in the literature. The cumulative distance traveled by the robot in these experiments exceeds 20km and the longest repeated route is 732 meters. 1