Abstract
In this paper, a vision-based localization method for an outdoor mobile robot is proposed. Drastic illumination change is one of the significant issues on outdoor vision system. We employ High Dynamic Range (HDR) vision to improve the robustness of image acquisition to illumination conditions. Our proposed method uses 2D gridmaps containing salient line segments on the road detected in images. A particle filter is employed to fuse the gyro-assisted odometry and 2D grid map matching to estimate the position of the robot. We carried out localization experiments and long distance navigation experiments in Real World Robot Challenge (Tsukuba Challenge 2010). Our robot with the proposed method successfully navigated part of the course of Tsukuba Challenge 2010.
