Robot navigation using panoramic tracking

A vision-based navigation system is presented for determining a mobile robot's position and orientation using panoramic imagery. Omni-directional sensors are useful in obtaining a 360° field of view, permitting various objects in the vicinity of a robot to be imaged simultaneously. Recognizing landmarks in a panoramic image from an a priori model of distinct features in an environment allows a robot's location information to be updated. A system is shown for tracking vertex and line features for omni-directional cameras constructed with catadioptric (containing both mirrors and lenses) optics. With the aid of the panoramic Hough transform, line features can be tracked without restricting the mirror geometry so that it satisfies the single viewpoint criteria. This allows the use of rectangular scene features to be used as landmarks. Two paradigms for localization are explored, with experiments conducted with synthetic and real images. A working implementation on a mobile robot is also shown.