Automatic Place Detection and Localization in Autonomous Robotics

This paper presents an approach for the simultaneous learning and recognition of places applied to autonomous robotics. While noteworthy results have been achieved with respect to off-line training process for appearance-based navigation, novel issues arise when recognition and learning are simultaneous and unsupervised processes. The approach adopted here uses a Gaussian mixture model estimated by a novel incremental MML-EM to model the probability distribution of features extracted by image-preprocessing. A place detector decides which features belong to which place integrating odometric information and a hidden Markov model. Tests demonstrate that the proposed system performs as well as the ones relying on batch off-line environmental learning.