ABSTRACT
Dead reckoning (derived from “deduced reckoning” of sailing days) is a simple mathematical procedure for determining the present location of a vessel by advancing some previous position through known course and velocity information over a given length of time (Dunlap & Shufeldt, 1972). The concept was mechanically applied to automobile navigation as early as 1910, when the Jones Live Map was advertised as a means of replacing paper maps and eliminating the stress associated with route finding (Catling, 1994). This rather primitive but pioneering system counted wheel rotations to derive longitudinal displacement and employed a frictionally driven steering wheel encoder for calculating heading, and was thus subject to cumulative errors that precluded its ultimate success. The vast majority of land-based mobile robotic systems in use today rely on very similar dead-reckoning schemes to form the backbone of their navigational strategy, but like their nautical counterparts, periodically null out accumulated errors with recurring “fixes” from assorted navigational aids.
