Visual homing for coordinated robot team missions

Abstract

Visual homing is a lightweight approach to visual navigation to direct a single robot to a visual landmark without the use of a map or any form of GNSS. However, applications that require a team of robots to operate robustly with respect to map and GNSS requirements, may also require groups of robots to move together and/or in a coordinated fashion. Examples include agricultural robotics where several robots must coordinate to deliver material to a visually identified rallying point, or a reconnaissance and surveillance mission where robots must move towards a (potentially moving) visual target in a formation. We present and evaluate several visual homing algorithms extended to handle team homing. We present evaluation results for stationary rallying points and moving target examples using a ROS/Gazebo simulated urban environment and real Turtlebot3 robots. We show that our algorithms produce accuracies within a 95% confidence interval in both simulation and physical experiments.