Title
Pose Estimation for Ground Robots: On Manifold Representation, Integration, Reparameterization, and Optimization
Abstract
In this article, we focus on pose estimation dedicated to nonholonomic ground robots with low-cost sensors, by probabilistically fusing measurements from wheel odometers and an exteroceptive sensor. For ground robots, wheel odometers are widely used in pose estimation tasks, especially in applications in planar scenes. However, since wheel odometer only provides two-dimensional (2D) motion measurements, it is extremely challenging to use that for accurate full 6-D pose (3-D position and 3-D orientation) estimation. Traditional methods for 6-D pose estimation with wheel odometers either approximate motion profiles at the cost of accuracy reduction, or rely on other sensors, e.g., inertial measurement unit, to provide complementary measurements. By contrast, we propose a novel motion-manifold-based method for pose estimation of ground robots, which enables to utilize wheel odometers for high-precision 6-D pose estimation. Specifically, the proposed method, first, formulates the motion manifold of ground robots by a parametric representation, second, performs manifold-based 6-D integration with wheel odometer measurements only, and third, reparameterizes manifold representation periodically for error reduction. To demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed algorithmic module, we integrate that into a sliding-window pose estimator by using measurements from wheel odometers and a monocular camera. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments are conducted for evaluation, and the proposed algorithm is shown to outperform competing the state-of-the-art algorithms by a significant margin in pose estimation accuracy, especially when deployed in complex, large-scale real-world environments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TRO.2020.3043970
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Ground robots,localization,motion manifold,state estimation,visual odometry
Journal
37
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1552-3098
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
30
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mingming Zhang111.36
Xingxing Zuo273.49
Yiming Chen318722.75
Yong Liu421345.82
Mingyang Li527017.60