Gaussian process estimation of odometry errors for localization and mapping.

Since early in robotics the performance of odometry techniques has been of constant research for mobile robots. This is due to its direct influence on localization. The pose error grows unbounded in dead-reckoning systems and its uncertainty has negative impacts in localization and mapping (i.e. SLAM). The dead-reckoning performance in terms of residuals, i.e. the difference between the expected and the real pose state, is related to the statistical error or uncertainty in probabilistic motion models. A novel approach to model odometry errors using Gaussian processes (GPs) is presented. The methodology trains a GP on the residual between the non-linear parametric motion model and the ground truth training data. The result is a GP over odometry residuals which provides an expected value and its uncertainty in order to enhance the belief with respect to the parametric model. The localization and mapping benefits from a comprehensive GP-odometry residuals model. The approach is applied to a planetary rover in an unstructured environment. We show that our approach enhances visual SLAM by efficiently computing image frames and effectively distributing keyframes.