Calibration of RGB-D Sensors for Robot SLAM

Abstract

This paper presents a calibration procedure for a Kinect RGB-D sensor and its application to robot simultaneous localization and mapping(SLAM). The calibration procedure consists of two stages: in the first stage, the RGB image is aligned with the depth image by using the bilinear interpolation. The distorted RGB image is further corrected in the second stage. The calibrated RGB-D sensor is used as the sensing device for robot navigation in unknown environment. In SLAM tasks, the speeded-up robust features (SURF) are detected from the RGB image and used as landmarks in the environment map. The depth image could provide the stereo information of each landmark. Meanwhile, the robot estimates its own state and landmark locations by mean of the Extended Kalman filter (EKF). The EKF SLAM has been carried out in the paper and the experimental results showed that the Kinect sensors could provide the mobile robot reliable measurement information when navigating in unknown environment.