Accurate calibration of kinematic parameters for two wheel differential mobile robots

Odometry using wheel encoders provides fundamental pose estimates for wheeled mobile robots. Systematic errors of odometry can be reduced by the calibration of kinematic parameters. The UMBmark method is one of the widely used calibration schemes for two wheel differential mobile robot. In this paper, an accurate calibration scheme of kinematic parameters is proposed by extending the conventional UMBmark. The contributions of this paper can be summarized as two issues. The first contribution is to present new calibration equations that remarkably reduce the systematic error of odometry. The new equations were derived to overcome the limitation of the conventional schemes. The second contribution is to propose the design guideline of the test track for calibration experiments. The calibration performance can be significantly improved by appropriate design of the test track. The numerical simulations and experimental results show that the odometry accuracy can be improved by the proposed calibration schemes.