Precise navigation for a 4WS mobile robot

Position and orientation estimation with high accuracy based on GPS and encoders for a four-wheel-steering vehicle (4WS) mobile robot is presented. A GPS receiver working in Real-Time Kinematics (RTK) mode can offer centimeter-level accuracy for our vehicle. In addition to GPS, the vehicle is equipped with four incremental encoders and two absolute encoders to provide information on wheels for estimation of velocity and sideslip angle of vehicle. The proposed architecture of position and orientation estimation consists of two extended Kalman filters and a processing unit of Runga-Kutta based dead reckoning. The first EKF fuses data from six encoders to estimate the vehicle velocity and the sideslip angle. The second EKF is applied to the estimation of position and orientation based on the measurement from precise RTK GPS data and output from first EKF. To obtain higher accuracy of estimation, an arbitrator is designed to switch between EKF2 and dead reckoning. The results and analysis of experiments are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Limitations of the proposed approach and future works are also pointed out and discussed in this paper.