A possible strategy to evaluate the odometry error of a mobile robot

The odometry error of a mobile robot contains both systematic and non-systematic components. This paper presents an error modeling of an odometry system for a synchronous drive system and a possible strategy in order to evaluate this error. The odometry error is modeled by introducing four parameters characterizing its systematic and non-systematic components (translational and rotational). We introduce five experimentally measurable quantities for a given robot motion, which we call observables. On the basis of our odometry error model we analytically compute the average values of the observables, which depend on the previous four parameters and on the considered robot motion. We suggest a possible strategy in order to simultaneously estimate the four parameters by estimating the observables. We show that our strategy only requires to measure the change in the orientation and position between the initial and the final configuration of the robot related to suitable robot motions. The strategy was applied to the platform Nomad150