An integrated stereo visual odometry for robotic navigation

•We propose a method to estimate the arbitrary motion of a stereo rig very accurately.•We account for different type of motion, side motion, forward motion and rotation motion.•The proposed method is a feature based method that can estimate very large motion.•The true motion parameters (velocity and acceleration) are obtained in presence of noise from a jerky robot motion.•On the contrary to the existing method, we estimated the exact translational motion as opposed to up to a scale factor.

In this paper, we propose a novel method to accurately estimate the arbitrary motion of a calibrated stereo rig from a noisy sequence. In the proposed method, a projective camera model is used which is appropriate for scenes where the objects are close to the camera or where there is depth variation in the scene. We propose a feature-based method that estimates large 3D translation and rotation motion of a moving rig. The translational velocity and acceleration and angular velocity of the rig are then estimated using a recursive method. In addition, we account for different motion types such as pure rotation and pure translation in different directions. In our studies, we assume that the rig motion is noisy, i.e., the acceleration and velocity of the camera are not perfectly constant. Our experimental results show that we obtain accurate estimates of rotation matrix and translation vector parameters across different test-cases with large and small baselines. For long sequences, the estimated motion parameters are within ±0.2±0.2  mm.