NASA’s two Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) have successfully demonstrated a robotic Visual Odometry capability on another world for the first time. This provides each rover with accurate knowledge of its position, which allows it to autonomously detect and compensate for any unforeseen slip encountered during a drive. It has enabled the rovers to drive safely and more effectively in highly-sloped...

Odometry forms an important component of many manned and autonomous systems. In the rail industry in particular, having precise and robust odometry is crucial for the correct operation of the Automatic Train Protection systems that ensure the safety of high-speed trains in operation around the world. Two problems commonly encountered in such odometry systems are miscalibration of the wheel enco...

Our research goal is to realize a robust navigation in indoor and outdoor environment for autonomous vehicle. An omnidirectional vehicle driven by four Mecanum wheels was chosen for our research platform. Mecanum wheel has 16 tilted rollers (45 degrees against the direction of wheel rotation) around the wheel, so the vehicle moves omnidirectionally by controlling these wheels independently. How...

This paper presents a visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system consisting of a robust visual odometry and an efficient back-end with loop closure detection and pose-graph optimization. Robustness of the visual odometry is achieved by utilizing dual cameras pointing different directions with no overlap in their respective fields of view mounted on an micro aerial vehicle (MAV)....

This paper proposes a robust visual odometry algorithm using a Kinect-style RGB-D sensor and inertial measurement unit (IMU) in a highly dynamic environment. Based on SURF (Speed Up Robust Features) descriptor, the proposed algorithm generates 3-D feature points incorporating depth information into RGB color information. By using an IMU, the generated 3-D feature points are rotated in order to ...

How do honeybees use visual odometry and goal-defining landmarks to guide food search? In one experiment, bees were trained to forage in an optic-flow-rich tunnel with a landmark positioned directly above the feeder. Subsequent food-search tests indicated that bees searched much more accurately when both odometric and landmark cues were available than when only odometry was available. When the ...