Pose determination of a mobile-task robot using an active calibration scheme

A new method of estimating the pose of a mobile-task robot is developed based upon an active calibration scheme. The utility of a mobile-task robot is widely recognized, which is formed by the serial connection of a mobile robot and a task robot. To be an efficient and precise mobile-task robot, the control uncertainties in the mobile robot should be resolved. Unless the mobile robot provides an accurate and stable base, the task robot cannot perform various tasks. For the control of the mobile robot, an absolute position sensor is necessary. However, on account of rolling and slippage of wheels on the ground, there does not exist any reliable position sensor for the mobile robot. This paper proposes an active calibration scheme to estimate the pose of a mobile robot that carries a task robot on the top. The active calibration scheme is to estimate a pose of the mobile robot using the relative position/orientation to a known object whose location, size, and shape are known a priori. For this calibration, a camera is attached on the top of the task robot to capture the images of the objects. These images are used to estimate the pose of the camera itself with respect to the known objects. Through the homogeneous transformation, the absolute position/orientation of the camera is calculated and that is propagated to getting the pose of a mobile robot. Two types of the objects are used here as samples of work-pieces. With these two samples, the proposed active calibration scheme is verified experimentally.