Divergent trinocular vision observers design for extended Kalman filter robot state estimation

Abstract

Here, we report the design of two deterministic observers that exploit the capabilities of a home-made divergent trinocular visual sensor to sense depth data. The three-dimensional key points that the observers can measure are triangulated for visual odometry and estimated by an extended Kalman filter. This work deals with a four-wheel-drive mobile robot with four passive suspensions. The direct and inverse kinematic solutions are deduced and used for the updating and prediction models of the extended Kalman filter as feedback for the robot’s position controller. The state-estimation visual odometry results were compared with the robot’s dead-reckoning kinematics, and both are combined as a recursive position controller. One observer model design is based on the analytical geometric multi-view approach. The other observer model has fundamentals on multi-view lateral optical flow, which was reformulated as nonspatial–temporal and is modeled by an exponential function. This work presents the analytical deductions of the models and formulations. Experimental validation deals with five main aspects: multi-view correction, a geometric observer for range measurement, an optical flow observer for range measurement, dead-reckoning and visual odometry. Furthermore, comparison of positioning includes a four-wheel odometer, deterministic visual observers and the observer–extended Kalman filter, compared with a vision-based global reference localization system.