DYNAMICALLY ESTIMATING MOBILE RANGE CAMERA POSE FROM INVARIANT FEATURE MEASUREMENTS

Abstract. Complex robotic tasks such as autonomous exploration and grasping demand the co-operation of sensors and actuators. In order to integrate sensor measurements and actuator control schemes wemust determine the rigid body transformations that relate the native co-ordinate frames of these devices. Equivalently, we need to estimate the relative pose of sensors and actuators in the system. We examine the problem of determining the pose of a robotmounted range- nding camera, and present a class of solutions motivated by the idea that mobile camera calibration is best addressed by an ongoing dynamic estimation process. We use range measurements and known robot kinematics to provide the estimate of camera pose which is maximally consistent with the available data. Our scheme uses scene features that are often present intypical workcell scenes and that are easily and reliably extracted. We develop several formulations of the principle, and present experimental results for both simulate