Finding landmarks autonomously along a route

A mobile robot memorizes scenes along a route by landmarks selected in a trial navigation and locates itself in the route based upon the memorized landmarks when the robot pursues the same route by itself. Since the stream of images observed continuously along the route is highly redundant, it is transformed into an intermediate 2(1/2)D representation, called panoramic representation with a much less amount of data. A structure map representing the object arrangement in space is then yielded in terms of 3D objects along the route found in the panoramic representation by fusing their range estimates and color attributes. By examining the spatial relationships, shapes and color attributes of the objects in the structure map, distinctive objects are selected as the landmarks. The route described by selected landmarks are recognized successfully, although the speed of camera motion and the illumination condition are changed considerably