A Deep Learning Approach for Robust Corridor Following
This work addresses robust navigation for autonomous systems in dynamic corridors, but it is incremental as it applies an existing deep learning approach to a specific task.
The paper tackles the problem of autonomous corridor following in changing environments by using a convolutional neural network to directly estimate control signals from images, showing advantages over traditional methods that fail in noisy conditions.
For an autonomous corridor following task where the environment is continuously changing, several forms of environmental noise prevent an automated feature extraction procedure from performing reliably. Moreover, in cases where pre-defined features are absent from the captured data, a well defined control signal for performing the servoing task fails to get produced. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we present in this work, using a convolutional neural network (CNN) to directly estimate the required control signal from an image, encompassing feature extraction and control law computation into one single end-to-end framework. In particular, we study the task of autonomous corridor following using a CNN and present clear advantages in cases where a traditional method used for performing the same task fails to give a reliable outcome. We evaluate the performance of our method on this task on a Wheelchair Platform developed at our institute for this purpose.