Simultaneous Calibration of Odometry and Head-Eye Parameters for Mobile Robots with a Pan-Tilt Camera

In the field of robot navigation, the odometric parameters, such as wheel radii and wheelbase length, and the relative pose of the optical sensing camera with respect to the robot are very important criteria for accurate operation. Hence, these parameters are necessary to be estimated for more precise operation. However, the odometric and head-eye parameters are typically estimated separately, which is an inconvenience and requires longer calibration time. Even though several researchers have proposed simultaneous calibration methods that obtain both odometric and head-eye parameters simultaneously to reduce the calibration time, they are only applicable to a mobile robot with a fixed camera mounted, not for mobile robots equipped with a pan-tilt motorized camera systems, which is a very common configuration and widely used for wide view. Previous approaches could not provide the z-axis translation parameter between head-eye coordinate systems on mobile robots equipped with a pan-tilt camera. In this paper, we present a full simultaneous mobile robot calibration of head–eye and odometric parameters, which is appropriate for a mobile robot equipped with a camera mounted on the pan-tilt motorized device. After a set of visual features obtained from a chessboard or natural scene and the odometry measurements are synchronized and received, both odometric and head-eye parameters are iteratively adjusted until convergence prior to using a nonlinear optimization method for more accuracy.