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Combined visual odometry and visual compass for off-road mobile robots localization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2011

Ramon Gonzalez ,
Francisco Rodriguez ,
Jose Luis Guzman ,
Cedric Pradalier  and
Roland Siegwart
Ramon Gonzalez*
Affiliation:
Department of Languages and Computation, University of Almería, Almería, Spain
Francisco Rodriguez
Affiliation:
Department of Languages and Computation, University of Almería, Almería, Spain
Jose Luis Guzman
Affiliation:
Department of Languages and Computation, University of Almería, Almería, Spain
Cedric Pradalier
Affiliation:
Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Roland Siegwart
Affiliation:
Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected].
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Summary

In this paper, we present the work related to the application of a visual odometry approach to estimate the location of mobile robots operating in off-road conditions. The visual odometry approach is based on template matching, which deals with estimating the robot displacement through a matching process between two consecutive images. Standard visual odometry has been improved using visual compass method for orientation estimation. For this purpose, two consumer-grade monocular cameras have been employed. One camera is pointing at the ground under the robot, and the other is looking at the surrounding environment. Comparisons with popular localization approaches, through physical experiments in off-road conditions, have shown the satisfactory behavior of the proposed strategy.

Keywords

Mobile robotsRobot localizationNavigationComputer visionService robots
Type
Articles
Information
Robotica , Volume 30 , Issue 6 , October 2012 , pp. 865 - 878
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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