Probabilistic visual recognition of artificial landmarks for simultaneous localization and mapping

Probabilistic robotics, most often applied to the problem of simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM), requires measures of uncertainty to accompany observations of the environment. This paper describes how uncertainty can be characterised for a vision system that locates coloured landmarks in a typical laboratory environment. The paper describes a model of the uncertainty in segmentation, the internal camera model and the mounting of the camera on the robot. It explains the implementation of the system on a laboratory robot, and provides experimental results that show the coherence of the uncertainty model.