A Decentralized Cooperative Navigation Approach for Visual Homing
  Networks
Mohamed Rahouti Damian Lyons Senthil Kumar Jagatheesaperumal Kaiqi Xiong
Visual homing is a lightweight approach to visual navigation. Given the
stored information of an initial 'home' location, the navigation task back to
this location is achieved from any other location by comparing the stored home
information to the current image and extracting a motion vector. A challenge
that constrains the applicability of visual homing is that the home location
must be within the robot's field of view to initiate the homing process. Thus,
we propose a blockchain approach to visual navigation for a heterogeneous robot
team over a wide area of visual navigation. Because it does not require map
data structures, the approach is useful for robot platforms with a small
computational footprint, and because it leverages current visual information,
it supports a resilient and adaptive path selection. Further, we present a
lightweight Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism for reaching consensus in the
untrustworthy visual homing network.