Estimation of Rotational Speeds of Skid-Steered Wheeled Mobile Robots Using an Improved Kinematic Model

It has been generally assumed that skid-steered wheeled robots have good odometry during translations, but unacceptable odometry during rotations. In this paper we propose an improved kinematic model for skid steered wheeled robots that enables directly using wheel rotations to estimate angular velocities and hence improve dead reckoning performance. The proposed model also takes into account position of the center of mass, giving good results even if the center of mass is displaced considerably.