Mobile Robot Localisation Using Learned Landmarks

We present an approach to vision-based mobile robot localisation. That is, the task of obtaining a precise position estimate for a robot in a previously explored environment, even without an a priori estimate. Our approach combines the strengths of statistical and feature-based methods. This is accomplished by learning a set of visual features called landmarks, each of which is detected as a local extremum of a measure of uniqueness and represented by an appearance-based encoding. Localisation is performed using a method that matches observed landmarks to learned prototypes and generates independent position estimates for each match. The independent estimates are then combined to obtain a final position estimate, with an associated uncertainty. Experimental evidence shows that an estimate accurate to a fraction of the environment sampling density can be obtained for a wide range of parameterisations, even under scaling of the explored region, and changes in sampling density. R ' ESUM..