Model-Based Circumnavigating Autonomous Robots

In this report, we propose a system for vision guided autonomous circumnavigation, allowing robots to navigate around objects of arbitrary pose. The system performs model-based object/view recognition from an intensity image using a canonical viewer-centred model. A path planned from a geometric model guides the robot in circumnavigating the object. This system can be used in many applications where robots have to recognize and manipulate objects of unknown pose and placement. Such applications occur in a variety of contexts such as factory automation, underwater exploration, space exploration and nuclear power station maintenance. We also define a canonical view graph to model objects, which is a viewer-centred representation. 1 Introduction Many tasks for autonomous mobile robots in manufacturing applications, dangerous environments, and space or underwater exploration involve a robot manipulating or closely observing/inspecting an object. In order to interact with an object, an a..