3D-Odometry for rough terrain - Towards real 3D navigation

Abstract

Up to recently autonomous mobile robots were mostly designed to run within an indoor, yet partly structured and flat. environment. In rough terrain many problems arise and position tracking becomes more difficult. The robot has to deal with wheel slippage and large orientation changes. In this paper we willfirst present the recent developments on the offroad rover Shrimp. Then a new method, called 3D-Odometry, which extends the standard 2D odometry to the 30 space will he developed. Since it accounts for transitions, the 3D-Odometry provides better position estimates. It will certainly hefp to go towards real 30 navigation for outdoor robots.