Correction of systematic odometry errors in mobile robots

This paper describes a practical method for reducing odometry errors caused by kinematic imperfections of a mobile robot. These errors, here referred to as “systematic” errors, stay almost constant over a prolonged period of time. Performing an occasional calibration as described here will increase the robot´s odometric accuracy and reduce operation cost because an accurate mobile robot requires fewer absolute positioning updates. Many manufacturers or end-users calibrate their robots-usually in a time-consuming and non-systematic trial and error approach. By contrast the authors´ method is systematic, provides near-optimal results, and can be performed easily and without complicated equipment. Experimental results are presented that show a consistent improvement of at least one order of magnitude in odometric accuracy (with respect to systematic errors) for a mobile robot calibrated with the procedure described in this paper