Title: Indoor mobile robot navigation using doorplate landmarks

Authors: An-Min Zou, Zeng-Guang Hou, Min Tan, Madan M. Gupta, Peter N. Nikiforuk, Noriyasu Homma

Addresses: Key Laboratory of Complex Systems and Intelligence Science, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China. ' Key Laboratory of Complex Systems and Intelligence Science, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China. ' Key Laboratory of Complex Systems and Intelligence Science, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China. ' College of Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon SK S7N 5A9, Canada. ' College of Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon SK S7N 5A9, Canada. ' Faculty of Medicine, Tohoku University, Sendai, 985-8575, Japan

Abstract: In the autonomous mobile robot industry, the landmark-based navigation method has been widely used in which landmark recognition plays an important role. The landmark recognition using visual sensors relies heavily on the quality of image segmentation. To localise and navigate the robot using vision information, the camera has to be first calibrated. In this paper, we use the camera to recognise floor and doorplate landmarks. Neural networks are used to calibrate the camera and solve the colour image segmentation problems, respectively, then the doorplate number recognition algorithm is described and the topological map is created by treating the doorplate landmarks as topological nodes.

Keywords: camera calibration; colour image segmentation; localisation; mobile robots; neural networks; vehicle autonomous systems; autonomous vehicles; robot navigation; doorplate landmarks; indoor navigation; landmark recognition; robot vision; visual sensors; floor landmarks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVAS.2006.012204

International Journal of Vehicle Autonomous Systems, 2006 Vol.4 No.2/3/4, pp.143 - 155

Published online: 28 Jan 2007 *

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