Experimental Odometry Calibration of the Mobile Robot Khepera II Based on the Least-Squares Technique

This paper develops an algorithm for odometry calibration of differential-drive mobile robots. As a first step, the kinematic equations are written so as to underline linearity in a suitable set of unknown parameters; then, the least-squares method is applied to estimate them. The wide literature on the least-squares formulation can thus be exploited; suitability of the data can be numerically verified. The proposed technique has been implemented on the Khepera II mobile robot; the obtained results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed calibration method also in comparison to other existing approaches.