Scalable appearance-based robot navigation

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"As I come down the hallway, heads start popping out of the cubicles and offices, all eyes turning in my direction. Some of my colleagues laugh, some frown. One looks terrified and flees. That's what happens, I suppose, when you show up at the office as a robot". So began a recent article in IEEE Spectrum (September 2010) by Erico Guizzo, to describe his experience of coming to work in his robot avatar. The context of the story defines an intuitive scenario for where and why this research is important and relevant. After all, if one can create a robot that "shows up" for you, a great number of opportunities will open up, including providing companionship and assistance to the elderly or physically handicapped in a household or hospital. But wait, you don't want to be bogged down by your avatar with every tedious and repetitive move, do you? At the heart of this type of autonomous mobile robot is the research of robot SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). The research described in this proposal is concerned with a promising approach to SLAM, called appearance-based SLAM (aSLAM). In aSLAM, the robot uses a camera to acquire sensor data and describes places of interest not in terms of 3D landmarks as is done traditionally, but in terms of pictures taken at these places, resulting in simple control algorithms with improved performance. The proposed aSLAM framework departs from the current method of image description based on the so-called bag-of-words (BoW) or vector-quantized visual features, but instead uses carefully selected raw visual features, to address the perceptual aliasing problem of BoW. In addition, our aSLAM framework will be online, through the use of hashing techniques for matching images, rather than tree structures which require offline construction. The research will be conducted in both indoor and outdoor environments, on wheeled robots and a humanoid robot called NAO. With any luck, we may just produce a robot avatar that can work as your electromechanical proxy in the near future!