Monocular teach-and-repeat navigation using a deep steering network with scale estimation

This paper proposes a novel monocular teach-and-repeat navigation system with the capability of scale awareness, i.e. the absolute distance between observation and goal images. It decomposes the navigation task into a sequence of visual servoing sub-tasks to approach consecutive goal/node images in a topological map. To be specific, a novel hybrid model, named deep steering network is proposed to infer the navigation primitives according to the learned local feature and scale for each visual servoing sub-task. A novel architecture, Scale-Transformer, is developed to estimate the absolute scale between the observation and goal image pair from a set of matched deep representations to assist repeating navigation. The experiments demonstrate that our scale-aware teach-and-repeat method achieves satisfying navigation accuracy, and converges faster than the monocular methods without scale correction given an inaccurate initial pose. The proposed network is integrated into an onboard system deployed on a real robot to achieve real-time navigation in a real environment. A demonstration video can be found online: https://youtu.be/ctlwDaMKnHw