Navigation using natural landmarks

This paper describes the navigation system used by J Edgar, a small vision-guided robot that roams the corridors at the University of Melbourne. Given a model of the environment, J Edgar is able to find its way to any given location, even when its initial location is completely unknown. To do this, the robot makes use of a probabilistic localisation technique, in which the robot maintains a probability distribution over the space of all possible robot locations. Given this distribution, the robot then applies a particular navigation strategy, whose aim is to ensure that the robot not only reaches the goal, but knows that it has reached the goal. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.