Image-based homing navigation with landmark arrangement matching

Many insects and animals exploit their own navigation systems to navigate in space. Biologically-inspired methods have been introduced for landmark-based navigation algorithms of a mobile robot. The methods determine the movement direction based on a home snapshot image and another snapshot from the current position. In this paper, we suggest a new landmark-based matching method for robotic homing navigation that first computes the distance to each landmark based on ego-motion and estimates the landmark arrangement in the snapshot image. Then, landmark vectors are used to localize the robotic agent in the environment and to choose the appropriate direction to return home. As a result, this method has a higher success rate for returning home from an arbitrary position than do the conventional image-matching algorithms.