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OptiOdom: A Generic Approach for Odometry Calibration of Wheeled Mobile Robots

Odometry calibration adjusts the kinematic parameters or directly the robot's model to improve the wheeled odometry accuracy. The existent literature considers in the calibration procedure only one steering geometry (differential drive, Ackerman/tricycle, or omnidirectional).

Our method, the OptiOdom calibration algorithm, generalizes the odometry calibration problem independently of the steering geometry considered. It is developed an optimization-based approach that uses the improved Resilient Propagation without weight-backtracking (iRprop-) for estimating the kinematic parameters using only the position data of the robot. Even though a test path is suggested to be used in the calibration procedure, the OptiOdom method is not path-specific.

In the experiments performed, the OptiOdom was tested using four different robots on a square, arbitrary, and suggested test paths. The OptiTrack motion capture system was used as a ground-truth.

Overall, the use of OptiOdom led to improvements in the odometry accuracy (in terms of maximum distance and absolute orientation errors over the path) over the existent literature while being a generalized approach to the odometry calibration problem. The OptiOdom and the methods from the literature implemented in the article are available in GitHub as an open-source repository.

Table of Contents

• Literature
• Kinematics
• OptiOdom: Theory Formulation
• Experimental Setup

Contributors

• Ricardo B. Sousa (corresponding author)
  • Affiliations: UTAD, INESC TEC
  • Email: [email protected]
  • ORCID: 0000-0003-4537-5095
• Marcelo R. Petry
  • Affiliations: INESC TEC
  • Email: [email protected]
  • ORCID: 0000-0002-7023-8562
• Professor António Paulo Moreira
  • Affiliations: FEUP, INESC TEC
  • Email: [email protected]
  • ORCID: 0000-0001-8573-3147
• Professor Paulo Costa
  • Affiliations: FEUP, INESC TEC
  • Email: [email protected]
  • ORCID: 0000-0002-4846-271X

Institutions

• CRIIS - Centre for Robotics in Industry and Intelligent Systems from INESC TEC - Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science
• Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (FEUP)

Funding

This work is financed by the ERDF - European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme, and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project SAICTPAC/0034/2015- POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016418. This work is also financed by the ERDF - European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961, and by National Funds through the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) as part of project UID/EEA/50014/2013.

Other Works Related with Wheel Odometry Calibration

• R. B. Sousa, M. R. Petry, and A. P. Moreira, "Evolution of odometry calibration methods for ground mobile robots," in 2020 IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC), April 2020, pp. 294–299. doi: 10.1109/ICARSC49921.2020.9096154.
• R. B. Sousa, "Odometry and extrinsic sensor calibration on mobile robots," Master's thesis, Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), INESC TEC – Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science, Porto, Portugal, 2020. url: https://sigarra.up.pt/feup/en/pub_geral.pub_view?pi_pub_base_id=410008.