Visual Teach and Repeat (VT&R) is an effective method to enable a vehicle to repeat any previously driven route using just a visual sensor and without a global positioning system. However, one of the major challenges in recognizing previously visited locations is lighting change, as this can drastically alter the appearance of the scene. In an effort to achieve lighting invariance, this paper details the design of a VT&R system that uses a laser scanner as the primary sensor. Unlike a traditional scan-matching approach, we apply appearance-based computer vision techniques to laser intensity images for motion estimation, providing us the benefit of lighting invariance. Field tests were conducted in an outdoor, planetary analogue environment, over an entire diurnal cycle, repeating a 1.1 km route more than 10 times with an autonomy rate of 99.7% by distance. We describe, in detail, our experimental setup and results, as well as how we address the various off-nominal scenarios related to feature-poor environments, hardware failures, and estimation drift. An analysis on motion distortion and a comparison with a stereo-based system is also presented. We show that even without motion compensation, our system is robust enough to repeat long-range routes accurately and reliably.


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Lighting-invariant Visual Teach and Repeat Using Appearance-based Lidar


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Journal of Field Robotics ; 30 , 2 ; 254-287


    Publication date :

    2013


    Size :

    34 Seiten




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Print


    Language :

    English







    Robust long-range teach-and-repeat in non-urban environments

    Ebert, Felix / Fassbender, Dennis / Naujoks, Benjamin et al. | IEEE | 2017


    Brightness appearance of automotive front lighting light sources - a series of visual experiments

    Bodrogi, Peter / Böll, Marvin / Schiller, Christoph et al. | Tema Archive | 2009