Odometry using wheel encoder is a common relative positioning technique for wheeled mobile robots. The major drawback of odometry is that the kinematic modeling errors are accumulated when the travel distance increases. Therefore, accurate calibration of odometry is required. In several related works, various schemes for odometry calibration are proposed. However, design guidelines of test tracks for odometry calibration were not considered. More accurate odometry calibration results can be achieved by using appropriate test track because the position and orientation errors after the test are affected by the test track. In this paper, we propose the design guidelines of test tracks for odometry calibration schemes using experimental heading errors. Numerical simulations and experiments clearly demonstrate that the proposed design guidelines result in more accurate calibration results.

Odometry using wheel encoders is one of the fundamental techniques for the pose estimation of wheeled mobile robots. However, odometry has a drawback that the position errors are accumulated when the travel distance increases. Therefore, position errors are required to be reduced using appropriate calibration schemes. The UMBmark method is the one of the widely used calibration schemes for two wheel differential drive robots. In UMBmark method, it is assumed that odometry error sources are independent. However, there is coupled effect of odometry error sources. In this paper, a new calibration scheme by considering the coupled effect of error sources is proposed. We also propose the test track design for the proposed calibration scheme. The numerical simulation and experimental results show that the odometry accuracy can be improved by the proposed calibration scheme.