Simultaneous calibration of odometry and camera for a differential drive mobile robot

Differential-drive mobile robots are usually equipped with video-cameras for navigation purposes. In order to ensure proper operational capabilities of such systems, several calibration steps are required to estimate the following quantities: the video-camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, the relative pose between the camera and the vehicle frame and, finally, the odometric parameters of the vehicle. In this paper the simultaneous estimation of the above mentioned quantities is achieved by a systematic and effective calibration procedure that does not require any iterative step. The calibration procedure needs only on-board measurements given by the wheels encoders, the camera and a number of properly taken camera snapshots of a set of known landmarks. Numerical simulations and experimental results with a mobile robot Khepera III equipped with a low-cost camera confirm the effectiveness of the proposed technique.