[Dprglist] Odometry and navigation

[David Anderson]

Hello DPRG,

Here are the links that were inquired about at today's DPRG meeting.  
The subject of discussion was the distinction between the terms 
"odometry" and "navigation."  Many folks use the term odometry to imply 
a method of navigation that is essentially ded reckoning.   However the 
itself term actually refers to a method for determining the robot's 
location and pose.  That location and pose information can in turn be 
used for a variety of purposes, including various forms of navigation, 
of which ded reckoning is one. (albeit a crude one in my opinion).  
These two papers hopefully shed some further light on that distinction.

1.  Tracking the robot's position in X,Y,theta with wheel encoders and 
wheel encoders plus gyroscope.   Section II.B details the classical  
odometry algorithm for a two wheel differentially driven platform:

http://geology.heroy.smu.edu/dpa-www/robo/Encoder/imu_odo/

2. Navigating to a waypoint target using the robot's location as 
collected by odometry as described in the previous paper:

http://www.geology.smu.edu/dpa-www/robo/challenge/navigation.html


Note that the navigation algorithm described here will work with any 
technique that can track the robot's location, and is not limited to 
location data collected by odometry.

cheers

dpa