Extract salient visual features from imagery-motor sequences for mobile robot navigation

This paper presents a method to extract salient visual features from imagery-motor sequences for mobile robot navigation based on the sensory-motor coordination principle. Salient feature extraction consists of three steps: tele-operation, offline association, and evaluation. First, the mobile robot is tele-operated in an environment along a path several times. All visual sensor data, along with non-visual sensor data and motor drive commands, are recorded. In the offline association step, these recorded sensory-motor sequences are partitioned into episodes according to the motor commands. Attention operator, texture energy, and average linkage clustering are used to discover the consistent visual features in the imagery sequences. Finally, these features, along with consistent non-visual features, are then used to drive the robot in the learned environment.