Local Navigation and Docking of an Autonomous Robot Mower using Reinforcement Learning and Computer Vision

We demonstrate a successful navigation and docking control system for the John Deere Tango autonomous mower, using only a single camera as the input. This vision-only system is of interest because it is inexpensive, simple for production, and requires no external sensing. This is in contrast to exis...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Taghibakhshi, Ali, Ogden, Nathan, West, Matthew
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 02.03.2021
Subjects
Computer vision
Docking
Global positioning systems
GPS
Learning
Navigation
Object recognition
Position sensing
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Summary:We demonstrate a successful navigation and docking control system for the John Deere Tango autonomous mower, using only a single camera as the input. This vision-only system is of interest because it is inexpensive, simple for production, and requires no external sensing. This is in contrast to existing systems that rely on integrated position sensors and global positioning system (GPS) technologies. To produce our system we combined a state-of-the-art object detection architecture, You Only Look Once (YOLO), with a reinforcement learning (RL) architecture, Double Deep QNetworks (Double DQN). The object detection network identifies features on the mower and passes its output to the RL network, providing it with a low-dimensional representation that enables rapid and robust training. Finally, the RL network learns how to navigate the machine to the desired spot in a custom simulation environment. When tested on mower hardware, the system is able to dock with centimeter-level accuracy from arbitrary initial locations and orientations.
ISSN:2331-8422