The convergence property of goal-based visual navigation

The use of landmarks is a natural and instinctive method to determine the whereabouts of a location or a means to proceed to a particular location. Results provided in this paper indicate that landmark-based navigation possesses a corrective or feedback trait that produces a convergence bound on the movements to the goal position, in contrast to the odometry-based movement, which leads to the drift between successive navigation movements. Experiments show that the vector field approach can be used to explain the convergence property of landmark-based guidance tasks. Experiments have been carried out operating with a Nomad mobile robot equipped with real-time visual landmark tracking system.