A Review on Visual Odometry Techniques for Mobile Robots: Types and Challenges

For autonomous navigation, tracking and obstacle avoidance, a mobile robot must have the knowledge of its position and localization over time. Among the available techniques for odometry, vision-based odometry is robust and economical technique. In addition, a combination of position estimation from odometry with interpretations of the surroundings using a mobile camera is effective. This paper presents an overview of current visual odometry approaches, applications, and challenges in mobile robots. The study offers a comparative analysis of different available techniques and algorithms associated with it, emphasizing on its efficiency and other feature extraction capability, applications and optimality of various techniques.