Dead reckoning for a lunar rover on uneven terrain

Abstract

This paper extends the classic dead reckoning approach to the case of a mobile robot moving on uneven terrain such as the lunar surface or a construction site. In addition to the wheel encoders employed in classical odometry, the approach uses accelerometer and gyroscopic sensors, routinely used in aviation but rarely found on contemporary mobile robots. The paper derives a complementary Kalman filter that fuses accelerometer and rate gyro data to increase the accuracy of dead reckoning on uneven terrain. The paper presents empirical demonstrations on the effectiveness of the new method with mobile robot traverses over crater ground.