Towards autonomous superyacht navigation

Towards Fully Autonomous Visual Navigation

This thesis addresses some key issues which affect the level of autonomy inherent in visual navigation systems, with wider applicability in a range of fields. They can be divided into two areas. Firstly, automated initialisation, in which the kinematic and camera calibration parameters needed for an active camera platform are calculated without user interaction. Secondly, the complexity problem...

Towards Autonomous Navigation of an UAV-based Mobile Mapping System

For situations, where mapping is neither possible from high altitudes nor from the ground, we are developing an autonomous micro aerial vehicle able to fly at low altitudes in close vicinity of obstacles. This vehicle is based on a MikroKopterTM octocopter platform (maximum total weight: 5kg), and contains a dual frequency GPS board, an IMU, a compass, two stereo camera pairs with fisheye lense...

From local visual homing towards navigation of autonomous cleaning robots

This thesis deals with the implementation of navigation strategies for a domestic floor-cleaning robot operating on omnidirectional images as primary sensory information. Such navigation strategies enable the robot to efficiently cover its entire workspace while avoiding both uncleaned areas and repeated coverage. This is accomplished (i) by systematically guiding the robot along meandering lan...

Towards the autonomous navigation of intelligent robots for risky interventions

The Autonomous City Explorer: Towards Semantic Navigation in Urban Environments

The Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) project aims to create a robot capable of navigating unknown urban environments without the use of GPS data or prior map knowledge. The robot finds its way by interacting with pedestrians and building a topological representation of its surroundings. This paper outlines the necessary ingredients for successful low-level navigation on sidewalks, information ret...