Invariant Feature Learning on a Mobile Robot

Teaching a robot to perceive and navigate in an unstructured natural world is a difficult task. Without learning, navigation systems are short-range and extremely limited. With learning, the robot can be taught to classify terrain at longer distances, but these classifiers can be fragile as well, leading to extremely conservative planning. A robust, high-level learning-based perception system for a mobile robot needs to continually learn and adapt as it explores new environments. To do this, a strong feature representation is necessary that can encode meaningful, discriminative patterns as well as invariance to irrelevant transformations. A simple realtime classifier can then be trained on those features to predict the traversability of the current terrain.