Optical Rails: View-Based Track Following with Hemispherical Environment Model and Orientation View Descriptors

We present a purely view-based method for robot navigation along a prerecorded track using compact omni directional view-descriptors. This paper focuses on a new model for the navigation environment to determine the steering direction by efficient holistic comparison of views. The concept of view descriptors based on low-order expansion of local orientation vectors into spherical harmonic basis functions is augmented by a linear illumination model, providing discriminative view matching also under illumination changes.