Ground robot navigation using uncalibrated cameras

Precise calibration of camera intrinsic and extrin- sic parameters, while often useful, is difficult to obtain during field operation and presents scaling issues for multi-robot systems. We demonstrate a vision-based approach to navigation that does not depend on traditional camera calibration, and present an algorithm for guiding a robot through a previously traversed environment using a set of uncalibrated cameras mounted on the robot. On the first excursion through an environment, the system builds a topological representation of the robot's exploration path, encoded as a place graph. On subsequent navigation missions, the method localizes the robot within the graph and provides robust guidance to a specified destination. We combine this method with reactive collision avoidance to obtain a system able to navigate the robot safely and reliably through the environment. We validate our approach with ground-truth experiments and demonstrate the method on a small ground rover navigating through several dynamic environments. I. INTRODUCTION Fig. 1. We present a vision-based method for ground robot navigation. Assuming that the robot has previously explored the environment (red path), the method provides guidance in the robot's body frame during revisitation (black arrows). we demonstrate the robustness of our method on real-world experiments in highly dynamic scenes.