Omni-directional vision for robot navigation in substation environments

Abstract

This paper presents a new omni-directional vision based navigation system for mobile robots in substation environments for 24h all-weather inspection. It is featured with near infrared illumination, omni-directional imaging, and artificial landmarks recognition. The extended Kalman filter (EKF) is also used to integrate the measurements from vision and odometer. Experiments have also been carried out to verify the functionalities of the system.