Exploring alternative navigation techniques

In this section, we’ll look at some potential alternative methods for navigation that we could use for our robot now that we’ve ruled out the SLAM methodology:

• We could just drive around randomly, looking for toys. When we find a toy, the robot picks it up and then drives around randomly looking for the toy box. When it sees the toy box, it drives up to it and deposits the toy. But we still need a method to avoid running over obstacles. We could follow a process called structure from motion (SfM) to get depth information out of our single camera and use that to make a map. Structure from motion requires a lot of textures and edges, which houses may not have. It also leaves lots of voids (holes) that must be filled in the map. Structure from motion uses parallax in the video images to estimate the distance to the object in the camera’s field of view. There has been a lot of interesting work in this area, and I...