Generation of stationary environmental map under unknown robot motion

Under the assumption of known motion of a robot, environmental maps of a real scene can be successfully generated by monitoring azimuth changes in an image. Several researchers have used this property for robot navigation. However, it is difficult to observe the exact motion parameters of the robot because of encoder measurement error. Therefore, observational errors in the generated environmental map accumulate in long movements of the robot. To generate a large environmental map, it is desirable not to assume known robot motion. In this paper, under the assumption of unknown motions of the robot, we propose a method to generate an environmental map and estimate the egomotion of a robot, by using an omnidirectional image sensor