Calibration of a mobile robot with application to visual navigation

The authors address the calibration problem between the stereo coordinate system and the odometric system of the INRIA mobile robot. A well-known equation is used to recover the rotation axis of the mobil robot in the stereo system, using information of motion from stereo. The calibration can be done with some simple maneuvers (pure rotation and pure translation). A motion-estimation algorithm from stereo is used to determine the displacement in the stereo coordinate system. With the calibration results, it is possible to transform the displacement that the robot should perform in the stereo reference to achieve its goal into the robot´s internal commands. As a sample application, a complete visual navigation loop is demonstrated