Fusion of fixation and odometry for vehicle navigation

Fixation is shown to be a visual routine which reduces dead-reckoning errors accumulated by an autonomous guided vehicle (AGV). By fixating on a landmark as the vehicle moves one can improve the navigation accuracy even if the scene coordinates of the landmark are unknown. In contrast with previous methods which assume that the coordinates of the landmark are known, our method enables any point of the observed scene to be selected as a landmark, and not just pre-measured points. Moreover, in contrast with other methods, in fixation only one point needs to be tracked. This disposes of the need to be able to identify which of the landmarks is currently being tracked, through a matching algorithm or by other means. Thus the incorporation of fixation into the navigation process does not involve long computation times and may be done while the vehicle is continuously moving. In addition to the basic method, we suggest an “emergency procedure” for obtaining absolute position once the vehicle gets lost. We support our findings with both experimental and simulation results