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A non-iterative and effective procedure for simultaneous odometry and camera calibration for a differential drive mobile robot based on the singular value decomposition

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Abstract

Differential-drive mobile robots are usually equipped with video cameras for navigation purposes. In order to ensure proper operational capabilities of such systems, several calibration steps are required to estimate the video-camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, the relative pose between the camera and the vehicle frame and the odometric parameters of the vehicle. In this paper, simultaneous estimation of the aforementioned quantities is achieved by a novel and effective calibration procedure. The proposed calibration procedure needs only a proper set of landmarks, on-board measurements given by the wheels encoders, and the camera (i.e., a number of properly taken camera snapshots of the set of landmarks). A major advantage of the proposed technique is that the robot is not required to follow a specific path: the vehicle is asked to roughly move around the landmarks and acquire at least three snapshots at some approximatively known configurations. Moreover, since the whole calibration procedure does not use external measurement devices, it can be used to calibrate, on-site, a team of mobile robots with respect to the same inertial frame, given by the position of the landmarks’ tool. Finally, the proposed algorithm is systematic and does not require any iterative step. Numerical simulations and experimental results, obtained by using a mobile robot Khepera III equipped with a low-cost camera, confirm the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Automazione, Elettromagnetismo, Ingegneria dell’Informazione e Matematica Industriale, Università degli Studi di Cassino, Via G. Di Biasio 43, 03043, Cassino (FR), Italy

    Gianluca Antonelli & Flavio Grossi

  2. Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Fisica dell’Ambiente, Università degli Studi della Basilicata, Viale dell’Ateneo Lucano 10, 85100, Potenza, Italy

    Fabrizio Caccavale & Alessandro Marino

Authors
  1. Gianluca Antonelli
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  2. Fabrizio Caccavale
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  3. Flavio Grossi
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  4. Alessandro Marino
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Correspondence to Alessandro Marino.

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Antonelli, G., Caccavale, F., Grossi, F. et al. A non-iterative and effective procedure for simultaneous odometry and camera calibration for a differential drive mobile robot based on the singular value decomposition. Intel Serv Robotics 3, 163–173 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-010-0067-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-010-0067-2

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