Visual homing for robot teams: do you see what I see?

Abstract

Visual homing is a lightweight approach to visual navigation which does not require GPS. It is very attractive for robot platforms with a low computational capacity. However, a limitation is that the stored home location must be initially within the field of view of the robot. Motivated by the increasing ubiquity of camera information we propose to address this line-of-sight limitation by leveraging camera information from other robots and fixed cameras. To home to a location that is not initially within view, a robot must be able to identify a common visual landmark with another robot that can be used as an ‘intermediate’ home location. We call this intermediate location identification step the “Do you see what I see” (DYSWIS) task. We evaluate three approaches to this problem: SIFT based, CNN appearance based, and a semantic approach.