Navigation & SLAM

Wheel Odometry

Wheel odometry is the estimation of a mobile robot's pose change by integrating wheel rotations measured with encoders through the platform's kinematic model. It is cheap and high-rate but accumulates unbounded drift from wheel slip, uneven terrain, and tire-diameter error, so it is typically fused with IMU, visual, or LiDAR measurements in a filter rather than trusted alone.

Why it matters for physical AI

Odometry remains the backbone prior for indoor mobile robot localization, and understanding its failure modes, especially slip, is essential when fusing it with learned or visual estimators on real fleets.