Pose estimation of differential drive robots using deep learning and raw sensor inputs

This paper presents an estimation method for determining the position and orientation of a real mobile robot using raw data from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensor, alongside linear and angular velocities obtained from simulation. The dataset was collected using a real TurtleBot3 differential drive wheeled mobile robot in the ROS-Gazebo simulation environment, encompassing 2018 routes-2009 from simulation and 9 from real-world experiments-each consisting of five randomly generated waypoints. To improve the accuracy of the estimation models, noise from the real IMU sensor was incorporated into the input data, and velocities derived from the pure pursuit algorithm were also included. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gradient Boosting (GB), and Random Forest (RF) models were employed to estimate the robot's position and orientation, and their performance was compared across both simulated and experimental scenarios. The results indicate that the CNN architecture consistently outperforms other models across all routes. Unlike many existing studies, this work directly utilizes raw sensor data without applying any feature extraction techniques, highlighting its novelty and contribution to the field.