Self navigation method for a drone or the like

A method for autonomous navigation by an autonomous vehicle, comprising:

• in a route learning phase to learn a route:
• acquiring views, via an image capture device mounted on the autonomous vehicle;
• encoding, via a neural network, the acquired views into embedding vectors;
• selecting snapshot locations;
• storing the embedding vectors of the corresponding views of the selected snapshot locations and associated heading information as route snapshots to form a rout memory sequence;
• and
• in a return homing navigation phase:
• acquiring a current view, via the image capture device mounted on the autonomous vehicle;
• encoding, via the neural network, the acquired current view into an embedding vector;
• calculating, via the neural network, a relative motion direction between the embedding vector of the current view and the embedding vectors of one or more selected route snapshots in the route memory sequence, wherein the calculated relative motion direction is calculated based on an estimate relative direction value and a probability distribution of the estimated relative direction value between the embedding vector of the current view and the selected route snapshots, and wherein the one or more route snapshots are selected from two of the snapshots toward a source point and one of the snapshots toward a sink point;
• and
• based on the calculated one or more relative motion directions, combining the heading information of the route snapshots to generate a next navigation control command to guide the autonomous vehicle to return along the learned route;
• and
• triggering a flip indication when the autonomous vehicle is past a current sink point;
• setting the current sink point as a new source point;
• and
• designating a next snapshot in a path sequence as a new sink point.