Determining the robot-to-robot 3D relative pose using combinations of range and bearing measurements (Part II)

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of motion induced 3D robot-to-robot extrinsic calibration based on different combinations of inter-robot measurements (i.e., distance and/or bearing observations) and ego-motion estimates, recorded across multiple time steps. In particular, we focus on solving minimal problems where the unknown 6-degree of-freedom transformation between two robots is determined based on the minimum number of measurements necessary for finding a discrete set of solutions. In our previous work [1], we have shown that only 14 base systems need to be solved, and provided closed-form solutions for three of them. This paper considers the remaining systems and provides closed-form solutions to most of them, while for some of the most challenging problems, we introduce efficient symbolic-numerical solution methods. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our proposed solvers through extensive simulations.