A simple algorithm for position and velocity estimation of mobile robots using omnidirectional vision and inertial sensors

Despite of many efforts by researches, real-time localization of mobile robot only using onboard sensor is still an open problem in mobile robotics. To contribute this research area, in this paper, a simple and effective method is proposed based on an adaptive estimator for estimating the position and linear velocity of a mobile robot in an unknown and unstructured environment using measurements of onboard inertial sensors and visual feedback of a catadioptric vision system. This novel method is developed on the basis of a new projection model of catadioptric vision, where the highly nonlinear projection model of catadioptric vision can be represented as a similar form to that of perspective vision. It is proved that this method leads to global exponential convergence of the estimation errors of the robot´s position and linear velocity to zero. Experimental results validate the performance of the proposed method.