Abstract

This paper presents an approach for the simultaneous learning and recognition of places applied to autonomous robotics. While noteworthy results have been achieved with respect to off-line training process for appearance-based navigation, novel issues arise when recognition and learning are simultaneous and unsupervised processes. The approach adopted here uses a Gaussian mixture model estimated by a novel incremental MML-EM to model the probability distribution of features extracted by image-preprocessing. A place detector decides which features belong to which place integrating odometric information and a hidden Markov model. Tests demonstrate that the proposed system performs as well as the ones relying on batch off-line environmental learning.