Radar detects stable, long-range objects under variable weather and lighting conditions, making it a reliable and versatile sensor well suited for ego-motion estimation. In this work, we propose a radar-only odometry pipeline that is highly robust to radar artifacts (e.g., speckle noise and false positives) and requires only one input parameter. We demonstrate its ability to adapt across diverse settings, from urban UK to off-road Iceland, achieving a scan matching accuracy of approximately 5.20 cm and 0.0929 deg when using GPS as ground truth (compared to visual odometry’s 5.77 cm and 0.1032 deg). We present algorithms for key point extraction and data association, framing the latter as a graph matching optimization problem, and provide an in-depth system analysis.
These keypoints must then undergo data association, also known as scan matching @cite_3 @cite_9 in robotics. The most common technique is iterative closest point (ICP) @cite_2 , which iteratively matches points using naive methods until the alignment between keypoint sets is sufficiently close @cite_9 @cite_0 . ICP relies on a good estimate of the relative displacement (i.e., motion prior) between scans. Other data association techniques search for motion parameters that optimize some objective function, like maximizing similarity (e.g., overlap of Gaussian distributions for NDT @cite_8 ) or minimizing distance (e.g., cluster edge difference @cite_1 ) between keypoint sets. Two further examples of objective functions characterize map quality @cite_6 and radar scan distortion @cite_7 in terms of motion. Feature-based approaches associate keypoints using descriptors, like BASD @cite_18 and SURF @cite_26 .
@cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_2
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This paper presents a method for pairwise 3D alignment which solves data association by matching scan segments across scans. Generating accurate segment associations allows to run a modified version of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm where the search for point-to-point correspondences is constrained to associated segments. The novelty of the proposed approach is in the segment matching process which takes into account the proximity of segments, their shape, and the consistency of their relative locations in each scan. Scan segmentation is here assumed to be given (recent studies provide various alternatives [10], [19]). The method is tested on seven sequences of Velodyne scans acquired in urban environments. Unlike various other standard versions of ICP, which fail to recover correct alignment when the displacement between scans increases, the proposed method is shown to be robust to displacements of several meters. In addition, it is shown to lead to savings in computational times which are potentially critical in real-time applications. We present a robot-pose-registration algorithm, which is entirely based on large planar-surface patches extracted from point clouds sampled from a three-dimensional (3-D) sensor. This approach offers an alternative to the traditional point-to-point iterative-closest-point (ICP) algorithm, its point-to-plane variant, as well as newer grid-based algorithms, such as the 3-D normal distribution transform (NDT). The simpler case of known plane correspondences is tackled first by deriving expressions for least-squares pose estimation considering plane-parameter uncertainty computed during plane extraction. Closed-form expressions for covariances are also derived. To round-off the solution, we present a new algorithm, which is called minimally uncertain maximal consensus (MUMC), to determine the unknown plane correspondences by maximizing geometric consistency by minimizing the uncertainty volume in configuration space. Experimental results from three 3-D sensors, viz., Swiss-Ranger, University of South Florida Odetics Laser Detection and Ranging, and an actuated SICK S300, are given. The first two have low fields of view (FOV) and moderate ranges, while the third has a much bigger FOV and range. Experimental results show that this approach is not only more robust than point- or grid-based approaches in plane-rich environments, but it is also faster, requires significantly less memory, and offers a less-cluttered planar-patches-based visualization. This paper presents a new approach to the multi-robot map-alignment problem that enables teams of robots to build joint maps without initial knowledge of their relative poses. The key contribution of this work is an optimal algorithm for merging (not necessarily overlapping) maps that are created by different robots independently. Relative pose measurements between pairs of robots are processed to compute the coordinate transformation between any two maps. Noise in the robot-to-robot observations, propagated through the map-alignment process, increases the error in the position estimates of the transformed landmarks, and reduces the overall accuracy of the merged map. When there is overlap between the two maps, landmarks that appear twice provide additional information, in the form of constraints, which increases the alignment accuracy. Landmark duplicates are identified through a fast nearest-neighbor matching algorithm. In order to reduce the computational complexity of this search process, a kd-tree is used to represent the landmarks in the original map. The criterion employed for matching any two landmarks is the Mahalanobis distance. As a means of validation, we present experimental results obtained from two robots mapping an area of 4,800 m2 In this work, we analyze three different registration algorithms: Chamfer distance matching, the well-known iterated closest points (ICP) and an optic flow based registration. Their pairwise combination is investigated in the context of silhouette based pose estimation. It turns out that Chamfer matching and ICP used in combination do not only perform fairly well with small offset, but also deal with large offset significantly better than the other combinations. We show that by applying different optimized search strategies, the computational cost can be reduced by a factor eight. We further demonstrate the robustness of our method against simultaneous translation and rotation.