Globally Consistent Mosaicking for Autonomous Visual Navigation

Abstract

Mobile robot localization from large-scale appearance mosaics has been showing increasing promise as a low-cost, high-performance and infrastructure-free solution to vehicle guidance in man-made environments. The feasibility of this technique relies on the construction of a high- resolution mosaic of the vehicle's environment. For reliable position estimation, the mosaic must be locally distortion-free as well as globally consistent. The problem of loop closure in cyclic environments that plagues this process is one that is commonly encountered in all map-building procedures, and its solution is often computationally expensive.