'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Abstract
International audienceIn this paper, the performance of a topological metric visual-path-following framework is investigated in different environments. The framework relies on a monocular camera as the only sensing modality. The path is represented as a series of refer- ence images such that each neighboring pair contains a number of common landmarks. Local 3-D geometries are reconstructed between the neighboring reference images to achieve fast feature prediction. This condition allows recovery from tracking failures. During navigation, the robot is controlled using image-based vi- sual servoing. The focus of this paper is on the results from a num- ber of experiments that were conducted in different environments, lighting conditions, and seasons. The experiments with a robot car show that the framework is robust to moving objects and moderate illumination changes. It is also shown that the system is capable of online path learning