MARVEL: a system that recognizes world locations with stereo vision

MARVEL is a system that supports autonomous navigation by building and maintaining its own models of world locations and using these models and stereo vision input to recognize its location in the world and its position and orientation within that location. The system emphasizes the use of simple, easily derivable features for recognition, whose aggregate identifies a location, instead of complex features that also require recognition. MARVEL is designed to be robust with respect to input errors and to respond to a gradually changing world by updating its world location models. In over 1000 recognition tests using real-world data, MARVEL yielded a false negative rate under 10% with zero false positives