Pose estimation from projective transformations for visual guidance of a wheeled mobile robot

Pose estimation is an essential task in many mobile robot navigation systems. Visual guidance provides a feasible means for pose estimation using the observed scene information as reference. This work presents an approach to estimate the pose of a mobile robot based on projective transformations. First, the Hough transform is used for lane detection. Next, a projective transformation is computed using the detected lines as reference. Finally, the robot's pose is estimated from the resulting projective transformation. The theoretical principles and computational implementation are analyzed. Experimental results of a visual navigation experiment are presented to validate the usefulness of the proposed approach.