Odometry is the critical factor to estimate the location of the robot. In the mobile robot with wheels, odometry can be performed using the information from the encoder. However, the information of location in the encoder is inaccurate because of the errors caused by the wheel's alignment or slip. In general, visual odometer has been used to compensate for the kinetic errors of robot. In case of using the visual odometry under some robot system, the kinetic analysis is required for compensation of errors, which means that the conventional visual odometry cannot be easily applied to the implementation of the other type of the robot system. In this paper, the novel visual odometry, which employs only the single camera toward the ground, is proposed. The camera is mounted at the center of the bottom of the mobile robot. Feature points of the ground image are extracted by using median filter and color contrast filter. In addition, the linear and angular vectors of the mobile robot are calculated with feature points matching, and the visual odometry is performed by using these linear and angular vectors. The proposed odometry is verified through the experimental results of driving tests using the encoder and the new visual odomtry.
