Autonomous Mobile Robot Localization and Navigation Using a Hierarchical Map Representation Primarily Guided by Vision

While impressive progress has recently been made with autonomous vehicles, both indoors and on streets, autonomous localization and navigation in less constrained and more dynamic environments, such as outdoor pedestrian and bicycle‐friendly sites, remains a challenging problem. We describe a new approach that utilizes several visual perception modules—place recognition, landmark recognition, and road lane detection—supplemented by proximity cues from a planar laser range finder for obstacle avoidance. At the core of our system is a new hybrid topological/grid‐occupancy map that integrates the outputs from all perceptual modules, despite different latencies and time scales. Our approach allows for real‐time performance through a combination of fast but shallow processing modules that update the map's state while slower but more discriminating modules are still computing. We validated our system using a ground vehicle that autonomously traversed three outdoor routes several times, each 400 m or longer, on a university campus. The routes featured different road types, environmental hazards, moving pedestrians, and service vehicles. In total, the robot logged over 10 km of successful recorded experiments, driving within a median of 1.37 m laterally of the center of the road, and localizing within 0.97 m (median) longitudinally of its true location along the route.