NAVIGATION BY INTEGRATING ICONIC AND GPS INFORMATION

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodofrobot navigation in outdoor environments by using GPS (Global Postioning System) information and panoramic views. Since an outdoor environment is very large scaled, it is very difficult to determine the global position basedona visual sensor. Although a global position can be obtainedfrom a GPS navigator, it is difficult to locate a robot accurately since it has a distance error about 30 100 meter. Our system is equipped with a GPS navigator and a camera. A coarse-to-fine methodisused to generate an outdoor environment map and locate a mobile robot. First, a robot finds its approximate position based on the GPS information. Then, it identifies its location from the image information. Experimental results in outdoor environments show the effectiveness of this method. 1 Introduction Making a map of environments and navigation by using the acquired map is an important problem for a mobile robot. Although many researches have been done so far, not so many...