ATOM Calibration Framework: Interaction and Visualization Functionalities

Abstract

Robotic systems are evolving to include a large number of sensors and diverse sensor modalities. In order to operate a system with multiple sensors, the geometric transformations between those sensors must be accurately estimated. The process by which these transformations are estimated is known as sensor calibration. Behind every sensor calibration approach is a formulation and a framework. The formulation is the method by which the transformations are estimated. The framework is the set of operations required to carry out the calibration procedure. This paper proposes a novel calibration framework that gives more flexibility, control and information to the user, enhancing the user interface and the user experience of calibrating a robotic system. The framework consists of several visualization and interaction functionalities useful for a calibration procedure, such as the estimation of the initial pose of the sensors, the data collection and labeling, the data review and correction and the visualization of the estimation of the extrinsic and intrinsic parameters. This framework is supported by the Atomic Transformations Optimization Method formulation, referred to as ATOM. Results show that this framework is applicable to various robotic systems with different configurations, number of sensors and sensor modalities. In addition to this, a survey comparing the frameworks of different calibration approaches shows that ATOM provides a very good user experience.

Keywords

• extrinsic calibration
• intrinsic calibration
• user experience
• multi-modal
• multi-sensor
• ROS