New perspectives on mobile robot navigation with visual and inertial information

Advanced sensor systems, exploring high integrity and multiple sensorial modalities, have been significantly increasing the capabilities of autonomous vehicles and enlarging their application potential. The article describes two relevant sensors for mobile robot navigation-active vision systems and inertial sensors. Vision and inertial sensing are two sensory modalities that can be explored for navigation. The article presents our results on the use and integration of those two modalities. In a first example we present a computational solution for the problem of visual based guidance of a moving observer, by detecting the orientation of the cameras set that maximises the valve of visual information. The algorithm explores the geometric properties of log-polar mapping. The second example, relies on the integration of inertial and visual information to defect the regions in the scene that we can drive a mobile platform: in our case the ground plane. The solution is based on information about the scene that could be obtained during a process of the visual fixation, complemented by the information provided by inertial sensors. The tests were performed with a mobile platform equipped with one active vision system and inertial sensors. The paper presents our results on simulation of visual behaviours for navigation.