In this paper, we present an omnidirectional-vision-based localization and mapping system which can detect whether a robotic mower is contained in a permitted area. We exploit a robot-centric mapping framework that exploits a differential equation of motion of the landmarks, which are referenced with respect to the robot body frame. The estimator in our system generates a 3D point-based map with landmarks. Concurrently, the estimator defines a boundary of the mowing area with the estimated trajectory of the mower. The estimated boundary and the landmark map are provided for the estimation of the mowing location and for the containment detection. We validate the effectiveness of our system through numerical simulations and present the results of the outdoor experiment that we conducted with our robotic mower.

This paper presents a vision-based localization and mapping algorithm for an autonomous mower. We divide the task for robotic mowing into two separate phases, a teaching phase and a mowing phase. During the teaching phase, the mower estimates the 3D positions of landmarks and defines a boundary in the lawn with an estimate of its own trajectory. During the mowing phase, the location of the mower is estimated using the landmark and boundary map acquired from the teaching phase. Of particular interest for our work is ensuring that the estimator for landmark mapping will not fail due to the nonlinearity of the system during the teaching phase. A nonlinear observer is designed with pseudo-measurements of each landmark's depth to prevent the map estimator from diverging. Simultaneously, the boundary is estimated with an EKF. Measurements taken from an omnidirectional camera, an IMU, and a ground speed sensor are used for the estimation. Numerical simulations and offline teaching phase experiments with our autonomous mower demonstrate the potential of our algorithm.

This paper describes the motivation, design and implementation of a Perception Validation System (PVS), a system for measuring the outdoor perception performance of an autonomous vehicle. The PVS relies on using large amounts of real world data and ground truth information to quantify performance aspects such as the rate of false positive or false negative detections of an obstacle detection system. Our system relies on a relational database infrastructure to achieve a high degree of flexibility in the type of analyses it can support. We discuss the main steps required for going from raw data to numerical estimates describing the performance of the perception system, including the generation of ground truth information and the safe speed metric we found to be most useful for comparing the perception system's outputs to the ground truth data. We present results illustrating some of the analyses that can be completed using the Perception Validation System.