Robot navigation using 1D panoramic images

This paper presents a new method for navigation and localization of a mobile robot equipped with an omnidirectional camera. We represent the environment using a collection of one-dimensional panoramic images formed by averaging the center scanlines of a cylindrical view. Such 1D images can be stored and processed with few resources, allowing a fairly dense sampling of the environment. Image matching proceeds in real time using dynamic programming on scale-invariant features extracted from each circular view. By analyzing the shape of the matching curve, the relative orientation of pairs of views can be recovered and utilized for navigation. When navigating, the robot continually matches its current view against stored reference views taken from known locations, and determines its location and heading from the properties of the matching results. Experiments show that our method is robust to occlusion, repeating patterns, and lighting variations