Pose Determination of a Mobile-Task Robot Using an Active Calibration of the Landmark

A new method of estimating the pose of a mobile-task robot is developed based upon an active calibration scheme. The utility of a mobile-task robot is widely recognized, which is formed by the serial connection of a mobile robot and a task robot. For the control of the mobile robot, an absolute position sensor is necessary. This paper proposes an active calibration scheme to estimate the pose of a mobile robot that carries a task robot on the top. The active calibration scheme is to estimate a pose of the mobile robot using the relative position/orientation to a known object whose location, size, and shape are known a priori. Through the homogeneous transformation, the absolute position/orientation of the camera is calculated and that is propagated to getting the pose of a mobile robot. With the experiments in the corridor, the proposed active calibration scheme is verified experimentally.