2,618 research outputs found

    Evaluating the Odometry Error of a Mobile Robot

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    This paper focuses on issues of odometry for the special case of synchronous drive wheeled mobile robots. In particular, the uncertainty in odometry is modeled by a four parameter statistical model already introduced in previous works together with a strategy to estimate the four parameters from actual data obtained from a given mobile robot. To obtain the data, the robot traverses a path. The error realized along that path is then used to estimate the model parameters. The accuracy on the parameter estimation through this strategy is here discussed by considering paths different for length and shape

    Simultaneous maximum-likelihood calibration of odometry and sensor parameters

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    For a differential-drive mobile robot equipped with an on-board range sensor, there are six parameters to calibrate: three for the odometry (radii and distance between the wheels), and three for the pose of the sensor with respect to the robot frame. This paper describes a method for calibrating all six parameters at the same time, without the need for external sensors or devices. Moreover, it is not necessary to drive the robot along particular trajectories. The available data are the measures of the angular velocities of the wheels and the range sensor readings. The maximum-likelihood calibration solution is found in a closed form

    Simultaneous Parameter Calibration, Localization, and Mapping

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    The calibration parameters of a mobile robot play a substantial role in navigation tasks. Often these parameters are subject to variations that depend either on changes in the environment or on the load of the robot. In this paper, we propose an approach to simultaneously estimate a map of the environment, the position of the on-board sensors of the robot, and its kinematic parameters. Our method requires no prior knowledge about the environment and relies only on a rough initial guess of the parameters of the platform. The proposed approach estimates the parameters online and it is able to adapt to non-stationary changes of the configuration. We tested our approach in simulated environments and on a wide range of real-world data using different types of robotic platforms. (C) 2012 Taylor & Francis and The Robotics Society of Japa

    The Odometry Error of a Mobile Robot with a Synchronous Drive System

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    This paper presents an error modeling of an odometry system for a synchronous-drive system and a possible strategy for evaluating this error. The odometry error is modeled by introducing four parameters characterizing its systematic and nonsystematic components (translational and rotational). The nonsystematic errors are expressed in terms of a covariance matrix, which depends on both the previous four parameters and the path followed by the mobile robot. In contrast to previous approaches which require assuming a particular path (straight or circular) in order to compute this covariance matrix, here general formulas are derived. We suggest a possible strategy for simultaneously estimating the four model parameters. As we will show, our strategy only requires measuring the change in the orientation and position between the initial and final configurations of the robot, related to suitable robot motions. In other words, it is unnecessary to know the actual path followed by the robot. We illustrate the proposed strategy by discussing the accuracy of the parameters estimation and by showing some experimental results obtained with the mobile robot Nomad150

    Joint on-manifold self-calibration of odometry model and sensor extrinsics using pre-integration

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    © 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper describes a self-calibration procedure that jointly estimates the extrinsic parameters of an exteroceptive sensor able to observe ego-motion, and the intrinsic parameters of an odometry motion model, consisting of wheel radii and wheel separation. We use iterative nonlinear onmanifold optimization with a graphical representation of the state, and resort to an adaptation of the pre-integration theory, initially developed for the IMU motion sensor, to be applied to the differential drive motion model. For this, we describe the construction of a pre-integrated factor for the differential drive motion model, which includes the motion increment, its covariance, and a first-order approximation of its dependence with the calibration parameters. As the calibration parameters change at each solver iteration, this allows a posteriori factor correction without the need of re-integrating the motion data. We validate our proposal in simulations and on a real robot and show the convergence of the calibration towards the true values of the parameters. It is then tested online in simulation and is shown to accommodate to variations in the calibration parameters when the vehicle is subject to physical changes such as loading and unloading a freight.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

    A minimalistic approach to appearance-based visual SLAM

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    This paper presents a vision-based approach to SLAM in indoor / outdoor environments with minimalistic sensing and computational requirements. The approach is based on a graph representation of robot poses, using a relaxation algorithm to obtain a globally consistent map. Each link corresponds to a relative measurement of the spatial relation between the two nodes it connects. The links describe the likelihood distribution of the relative pose as a Gaussian distribution. To estimate the covariance matrix for links obtained from an omni-directional vision sensor, a novel method is introduced based on the relative similarity of neighbouring images. This new method does not require determining distances to image features using multiple view geometry, for example. Combined indoor and outdoor experiments demonstrate that the approach can handle qualitatively different environments (without modification of the parameters), that it can cope with violations of the “flat floor assumption” to some degree, and that it scales well with increasing size of the environment, producing topologically correct and geometrically accurate maps at low computational cost. Further experiments demonstrate that the approach is also suitable for combining multiple overlapping maps, e.g. for solving the multi-robot SLAM problem with unknown initial poses

    Fast, Accurate Thin-Structure Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Mobile Robots

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    Safety is paramount for mobile robotic platforms such as self-driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles. This work is devoted to a task that is indispensable for safety yet was largely overlooked in the past -- detecting obstacles that are of very thin structures, such as wires, cables and tree branches. This is a challenging problem, as thin objects can be problematic for active sensors such as lidar and sonar and even for stereo cameras. In this work, we propose to use video sequences for thin obstacle detection. We represent obstacles with edges in the video frames, and reconstruct them in 3D using efficient edge-based visual odometry techniques. We provide both a monocular camera solution and a stereo camera solution. The former incorporates Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data to solve scale ambiguity, while the latter enjoys a novel, purely vision-based solution. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed methods are fast and able to detect thin obstacles robustly and accurately under various conditions.Comment: Appeared at IEEE CVPR 2017 Workshop on Embedded Visio
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