Feature matching in 360 degrees waveforms for robot navigation

Abstract

A target location is represented by compressing a 360 degrees image from a spherical mirror into a circular waveform. Navigation tasks are specified as a sequence of homing tasks on target locations. This is accomplished by matching landmarks from the current view with the next target view. A method is provided for matching using qualitative geometric features of each of the waveforms. In addition, a geometric analysis allows one to do 3-D reasoning about the environment, which is sufficient for computing the rotation and translation between the current location and the target location. It eventually may allow acquisition of a 3-D model of the environment.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>