VILSS: Global description of images. Application to robot mapping and localisation

Luis Payá, Miguel Hernández University, Spain

Nowadays, the design of fully autonomous mobile robots is a key discipline. Building a robust model of the unknown environment is an important ability the robot must develop. Using this model, the robot must be able to estimate its current position and to navigate to the target points. The use of omnidirectional vision sensors is usual to solve these tasks. When using this source of information, the robot must extract relevant information from the scenes both to build the model and to estimate its position. The possible frameworks include the classical approach of extracting and describing local features or working with the global appearance of the scenes, which has emerged as a conceptually simple and robust solution. In this talk, the role of global-appearance techniques in robot mapping and localization is analysed.