Robust Autonomous Structure-Based Color Learning on a Mobile Robot

Abstract

The scientific community is working towards the creation of fully autonomous mobile robots capable of interacting with the proverbial real world. Autonomous robots are predom-inantly dependent on sensory information but the ability to accurately sense the complex world is still missing. Visual input, in the form of color images from a camera, should be an excellent and rich source of such information, consid-ering the significant amount of progress made in machine vision. But color, and images in general, have been used sparingly on mobile robots, where people have mostly fo-cussed their attention on other sensors such as sonar and laser. There are three main reasons for this reliance on other relatively low-fidelity sensors. First, most sophisticated vi-sion algorithms require substantial amount of computational and/or memory resources making them infeasible to use on