This thesis addresses the issues of visual landmark recognition in autonomous robot navigation along known routes, by intuitively exploiting the functions of the human visual system and its navigational ability. A feedforward-feedbackward architecture has been developed for recognising visual landmarks in real-time. It integrates the theoretical concepts from the pre-attentive and attentive stages in the human visual system, the selective attention adaptive resonance theory neural network and its derivatives, and computational approaches toward object recognition in computer vision.

This book presents some of the most recent research results in the area of machine learning and robot perception. The chapters represent new ways of solving real-world problems. The book covers topics such as intelligent object detection, foveated vision systems, online learning paradigms, reinforcement learning for a mobile robot, object tracking and motion estimation, 3D model construction, computer vision system and user modelling using dialogue strategies. This book will appeal to researchers, senior undergraduate/postgraduate students, application engineers and scientists.

The 18th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI 2005) was held at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Sydney, Australia from 5 to 9 December 2005. AI 2005 attracted a historical record number of submissions, a total of 535 papers. The review process was extremely selective. Out of these 535 submissions, the Program Chairs selected only 77 (14.4%) full papers and 119 (22.2%) short papers based on the review reports, making an acceptance rate of 36.6% in total. Authors of the accepted papers came from over 20 countries. This volume of the proceedings contains the abstracts of three keynote speeches and all the full and short papers. The full papers were categorized into three broad sections, namely: AI foundations and technologies, computational intelligence, and AI in specialized domains. AI 2005 also hosted several tutorials and workshops, providing an interacting mode for specialists and scholars from Australia and other countries. Ronald R. Yager, Geoff Webb and David Goldberg (in conjunction with ACAL05) were the distinguished researchers invited to give presentations. Their contributions to AI 2005 are really appreciated.

During the last years there has been an increasing interest in the area of service robots. Under this category we find robots working in tasks such as elderly care, guiding, office and domestic assistance, inspection, and many more. Service robots usually work in indoor environments designed for humans, with offices and houses being some of the most typical examples. These environments are typically divided into places with different functionalities like corridors, rooms or doorways. The ability to learn such semantic categories from sensor data enables a mobile robot to extend its representation of the environment, and to improve its capabilities. As an example, natural language terms like corridor or room can be used to indicate the position of the robot in a more intuitive way when communicating with humans. This book presents several approaches to enable a mobile robot to categorize places in indoor environments. The categories are indicated by terms which represent the different regions in these environments. The objective of this work is to enable mobile robots to perceive the spatial divisions in indoor environments in a similar way as people do. This is an interesting step forward to the problem of moving the perception of robots closer to the perception of humans. Many approaches introduced in this book come from the area of pattern recognition and classification. The applied methods have been adapted to solve the specific problem of place recognition. In this regard, this work is a useful reference to students and researchers who want to introduce classification techniques to help solve similar problems in mobile robotics.

Algorithms that control the computational processes relating sensors and actuators are indispensable for robot navigation and the perception of the world in which they move. Therefore, a deep understanding of how algorithms work to achieve this control is essential for the development of efficient and usable robots in a broad field of applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th Australian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2004, held in Cairns, Australia, in December 2004. The 78 revised full papers and 62 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 340 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agents; biomedical applications; computer vision, image processing, and pattern recognition; ontologies, knowledge discovery and data mining; natural language and speech processing; problem solving and reasoning; robotics; and soft computing.

This monograph is devoted to the theory and development of autonomous navigation of mobile robots using computer vision based sensing mechanism. The conventional robot navigation systems, utilizing traditional sensors like ultrasonic, IR, GPS, laser sensors etc., suffer several drawbacks related to either the physical limitations of the sensor or incur high cost. Vision sensing has emerged as a popular alternative where cameras can be used to reduce the overall cost, maintaining high degree of intelligence, flexibility and robustness. This book includes a detailed description of several new approaches for real life vision based autonomous navigation algorithms and SLAM. It presents the concept of how subgoal based goal-driven navigation can be carried out using vision sensing. The development concept of vision based robots for path/line tracking using fuzzy logic is presented, as well as how a low-cost robot can be indigenously developed in the laboratory with microcontroller based sensor systems. The book describes successful implementation of integration of low-cost, external peripherals, with off-the-shelf procured robots. An important highlight of the book is that it presents a detailed, step-by-step sample demonstration of how vision-based navigation modules can be actually implemented in real life, under 32-bit Windows environment. The book also discusses the concept of implementing vision based SLAM employing a two camera based system.

Landmark recognition is identified as one important research area in robot navigation systems. It is a key feature for building robots capable of navigating and performing tasks in human environments. However, current object recognition research largely ignores the problems that the mobile robot context introduces. We developed a landmark recognition system which is used by a humanoid robot to identify landmarks during its navigation. The humanoid landmark recognition system is based on a two-step classification stage which is robust and invariant towards scaling and translations. Also, it provides a good balance between fast processing time and high detection accuracy. An appearance-based classification method is initially used to provide the rough initial estimate of the landmark. It is followed by a refinement step using a model-based method to estimate an accurate classification of the object. The goal of our work is to develop a rapid, robust object recognition system with a high detection rate that can actually be used by a humanoid robot to recognize landmarks during its navigation.