Rule based filtering and fusion of odometry and gyroscope for a fail safe dead reckoning system of a mobile robot

For mobile robot behavior such as navigation and map building, the estimation of own position is very important. Odometry is often utilized for the position estimation by accumulating the amount of wheel rotations. In outdoor environment, the estimated position by odometry has not only the cumulative error but also occasional error by traveling over a small obstacle or a bump under the wheel. In this paper, we propose accurate and robust dead reckoning system by fusion and filtering with odometry and gyroscope. The proposed dead reckoning algorithm can reduce the ill-effect of road surface, estimate the bias drift of gyroscope and warn a failure of sensor. It would work very well in outdoor as well as indoor environment.