Practical Implementation of Visual Navigation Based on Semantic Segmentation for Human-Centric Environments

Abstract

This study focuses on visual navigation methods for autonomous mobile robots based on semantic segmentation results. The challenge is to perform the expected actions without being affected by the presence of pedestrians. Therefore, we implemented a semantics-based localization method that is not affected by dynamic obstacles and a direction change method at intersections that functions even with coarse-grain localization results. The proposed method was evaluated through driving experiments in the Tsukuba Challenge 2022, where a 290 m run including 10 intersections was achieved in the confirmation run section.