As new technologies continue to develop, more and more robots are replacing humans in situations deemed too dangerous. However, current solutions are not fully automated, requiring offsite human operators for executing basic actions. The ideal solution would be a fully autonomous vehicle that could complete its objectives without any human intervention. In this project, the viability of optical...

Over the last years researchers proposed numerous indoor localisation and navigation systems. However, solutions that use WiFi or Radio Frequency Identification require infrastructure to be deployed in the navigation area and infrastructure-less techniques, e.g. the ones based on mobile cell ID or dead reckoning suffer from large accuracy errors. In this Thesis, we present a novel approach of i...

Navigation in outdoor terrain is di cult due to a lack of easily and uniquely identi able landmarks. This paper outlines current research on extraction of navigationally salient features from images and maps, feature matching and viewpoint determination, landmark selection, detection and diagnosis of route following errors, perceptual issues related to vision-based navigation, and database and ...

A vision based navigation system to guide an endoscope inside a human colon has been designed and tested. It uses low level vision techniques to extract two types of navigational landmarks, dark regions and curved contours. Dark regions correspond to the distant inner space of the colon, called the lumen. The curved contours represent occlusions due to the inner colon muscles. A hierarchical se...

Intuitive navigation is extremely important for the exploration of virtual environments. The best navigation is available in computer games, where it is mandatory that the player can control the movements of his avatar quickly and with a steep learning curve. Such intuitive navigation requires collision detection. In this paper we present a system that performs a very fast and robust collision ...

The ability to navigate in known and unknown environments belongs to the key skills of today’s mobile robots. Especially in structured environments, characteristics of the robot’s surroundings can be used to simplify the task. In many everyday scenarios, routes constitute a good representative of the structural nature of the robot’s world. In addition, a route description is an adequate means t...

In this thesis we propose a vision-based robot navigation system that constructs a high level topological representation of the world. A robot using this system learns to recognize rooms and spaces by building a hidden Markov model of the environment. Motion planning is performed by doing bidirectional heuristic search with a discrete set of actions that account for the robot's nonholonomic con...

Most UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) today use the GPS (Global Positioning System) for navigation. While GPS is an accurate and usually reliable aid to navigation, it can be unavailable for various reasons. The aim of this project is to develop an alternative navigation method, which can be used when GPS transmissions are not available. The method suggested here is called Feature Based Navigati...

This paper presents a proposal of navigation for the user, based on an existing ontology of the domain of the learning course. The navigation scheme of the course stands on interconnection of an ontology with existing learning material by the use of the keywords of the domain. On one side there is the user’s needs and goals and on the other side are possibilities and limitation of existing syst...