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.