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About

Kok Seng Chong is a robotics researcher whose work has made significant contributions to mobile robot navigation, mapping, and sensor-based localization. His research sits at the intersection of autonomous systems, odometry, and environmental perception, with a particular focus on enabling robots to navigate and map real-world indoor environments reliably and accurately. Chong's most influential contribution is his 2002 paper on accurate odometry and error modelling (225 citations), which established a rigorous framework for designing and calibrating low-cost dead-reckoning systems — a foundational challenge in mobile robotics. This work provided a consistent mathematical model for estimating position and orientation errors that remains widely referenced in the field. Alongside this, his late 1990s research pioneered feature-based mapping using ultrasonic sonar arrays, demonstrating practical large-scale map building in real indoor environments. His robot Werrimbi served as a testbed for identifying common indoor landmarks — planes, corners, and edges — using sonar sensing combined with precise odometry data. Papers from this period (1998–1999) garnered nearly 200 additional citations, underscoring their lasting influence. Collectively, Chong's body of work helped lay critical groundwork for what would become modern simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) research, offering practical, deployable solutions where earlier approaches relied on unrealistic environmental assumptions.