Analysis of ROS-based Visual and Lidar Odometry for a Teleoperated Crawler-type Robot in Indoor Environment

This article presents a comparative analysis of ROS-based monocular visual odometry, lidar odometry and ground truth-related path estimation for a crawler-type robot in indoor environment. We tested these methods with the crawler robot "Engineer", which was teleoperated in a small-sized indoor workspace with office-style environment. Since robot's onboard computer can not work simultaneously with ROS packages of lidar odometry and visual SLAM, we used online computation of lidar odometry, while video data from onboard camera was processed offline by ORB-SLAM and LSD-SLAM algorithms. As far as crawler robot motion is accompanied by significant vibrations, we faced some problems with these visual SLAM, which resulted in decreasing accuracy of robot trajectory evaluation or even fails in visual odometry, in spite of using a video stabilization filter. The comparative analysis shown that lidar odometry is close to the ground truth, whereas visual odometry can demonstrate significant trajectory deviations.