Learning to Autonomously Select Landmarks for Navigation and Communication

Selecting landmarks for use by a navigating mobile robot is important for map-building systems. However, it can also provide a way by which robots can communicate route information, so that one robot can tell another how to find a goal location. A route through an environment can be described by the landmarks encountered along the path, and a robot following the same path must identify the perceptions corresponding to the actual landmarks in the description in order to localise itself. This paper presents an algorithm to automatically select landmarks, choosing as landmarks places that do not fit into a model of typical perceptions acquired by the robot. Four methods of aligning the landmarks between different runs on the same route are also presented. The different alignment methods are evaluated according to both how well they produce matching landmarks and how suitable such alignment methods would be for use in a route communication system.