Online self-calibration for mobile robots

Abstract

This paper proposes a statistical method for calibrating the odometry of mobile robots. In contrast to previous approaches, which require explicit measurements of actual motion when calibrating a robot's odometry, the algorithm proposed here uses the robot's sensors to automatically calibrate the robot as it operates. An efficient, incremental maximum likelihood algorithm enables the robot to adapt to changes in its kinematics online, as they occur. The appropriateness of the approach is demonstrated in two large-scale environments, where the amount of odometric error is reduced by an order of magnitude.