An approach to odometry calibration of differential drive mobile robots

Odometry is the most widely used method for estimation of the momentary pose of mobile robots. It provides easily accessible real-time pose information between periodic absolute position measurements. However, with time, odometric localization accumulates errors in an unbounded fashion. This paper describes an approach to odometry calibration, which is based on two simple experiments. The proposed calibration method makes a correction mostly on the mobile robot orientation since this component of the mobile robot pose is more under systematic error influence.