Selection of efficient landmarks for an autonomous vehicle

This paper describes an approach to automatic landmark selection for navigation of a vision guided vehicle. The system works in two phases. In the first phase, the vehicle is driven by a human through a corridor. During this movement, a vision system extracts features such as doors or staircases. The category and the location of extracted features are recorded in a map. In the second phase, given a destination by a human, the system examines the map and selects a sequence of landmarks which guide the vehicle to the destination in the minimum time. Both the uncertainty of the motion of dead reckoning and that of visual data are considered in landmark selection. Preliminary experiments are performed for a autonomous vehicle which moves in the authors´ building