Lighting in Nighttime Vision-Based Localisation

In an effort to create high reliability autonomous ground vehicles capable of operations 24 hours a day, redundancy plays a key role. In particular, localisation systems need to have multiple separate systems to allow for position validation and backup in case of failure of the primary localiser. These systems need to provide high performance in day and night conditions. In this paper, we investigate the onboard and offboard lighting required to allow a vision-based localisation system to provide high performance during night operations in an industrial environment. The comprehensive discussion on sensors and setup and the quantitative evaluation presented provide a relevant discussion towards using vision systems 24 hours a day.