4WD Robot Posture Estimation by Radial Multi-View Visual Odometry

Abstract

This chapter presents a four-wheel robot’s trajectory tracking model by an extended Kalman filter (EKF) estimator for visual odometry using a divergent trinocular visual sensor. The trinocular sensor is homemade and a specific observer model was developed to measure 3D key-points by combining multi-view cameras. The observer approaches a geometric model and the key-points are used as references for estimating the robot’s displacement. The robot’s displacement is estimated by triangulation of multiple pairs of environmental 3D key-points. The four-wheel drive (4WD) robot’s inverse/direct kinematic control law is combined with the visual observer, the visual odometry model, and the EKF. The robot’s control law is used to produce experimental locomotion statistical variances and is used as a prediction model in the EKF. The proposed dead-reckoning approach models the four asynchronous drives and the four damping suspensions. This chapter presents the deductions of models, formulations and their validation, as well as the experimental results on posture state estimation comparing the four-wheel dead-reckoning model, the visual observer, and the EKF with an external global positioning reference.