Insect-inspired holistic visual navigation methods for navigation of wheeled and flying robots in outdoor environments

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Ralf Möller; Dr. Wolfgang Stürzl
• Subject Area: Automation, Mechatronics, Control Systems, Intelligent Technical Systems, Robotics ; Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 259361312

Insect-inspired holistic methods for visual robot navigation are anemerging alternative to the ubiquitous feature-based methods. Rather than extracting and matching local feature descriptors, holistic methods interrelate entire images with each other. The holistic approach promises low computational effort and good navigation performance over different environments. The goal of this project isto substantially advance holistic methods and overcome currentlimitations, especially by increasing the degrees of freedom which can be handled, by improving illumination tolerance, and by developing methods capable of operating in environments with complex depthstructure. Since these three main requirements are particularly strong in outdoor environments, the applicability of holistic methods will be demonstrated in outdoor robot experiments, both on a flying robot (multicopter) in an inspection or surveillance task and on a wheeledoutdoor robot in a lawn mower scenario.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants