Vision for mobile robot navigation: a survey

TLDR

The paper reviews two decades of progress in vision-based mobile robot navigation, covering both indoor and outdoor settings. The authors classify navigation strategies by environment type, detailing indoor structured approaches using geometrical and topological models, and unstructured approaches employing optical flow, appearance-based methods, and object recognition.

Abstract

Surveys the developments of the last 20 years in the area of vision for mobile robot navigation. Two major components of the paper deal with indoor navigation and outdoor navigation. For each component, we have further subdivided our treatment of the subject on the basis of structured and unstructured environments. For indoor robots in structured environments, we have dealt separately with the cases of geometrical and topological models of space. For unstructured environments, we have discussed the cases of navigation using optical flows, using methods from the appearance-based paradigm, and by recognition of specific objects in the environment.