Self-location of a mobile robot with uncertainty by cooperation of a heading sensor and a CCD TV camera

Goal-oriented navigation of a mobile robot by landmark based techniques is a straightforward and suitable approach. Most of the methods would normally give an estimation of the position and orientation of the vehicle, but often they are not able to provide a good estimate of the uncertainty in the measurement. That information is useful in application where multisensor fusion is requested. Our method permits to determine the vehicle location and relative uncertainty, when its orientation is obtained by a heading sensor, using a visual landmark based method. The approach is straightforward and suitable for real time performance on general purpose hardware. Experimental results are provided by implementation on our autonomous mobile vehicle SAURO.