Cameras and 2D laser scanners, in combination, are able to provide low-cost, light-weight and accurate solutions, which make their fusion well-suited for many robot navigation tasks. However, correct data fusion depends on precise calibration of the rigid body transform between the sensors. In this paper we present the first framework that makes use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for odometry estimation fusing 2D laser scanners and mono-cameras. The use of CNNs provides the tools to not only extract the features from the two sensors, but also to fuse and match them without needing a calibration between the sensors. We transform the odometry estimation into an ordinal classification problem in order to find accurate rotation and translation values between consecutive frames. Results on a real road dataset show that the fusion network runs in real-time and is able to improve the odometry estimation of a single sensor alone by learning how to fuse two different types of data information.
Laser scanners are also popular for classic pose estimation because of its accuracy. Classic approaches for this problem consist in trying to match two point clouds and estimate the transformation between them, this solution is known as Iterative Closest Point (ICP) @cite_16 . Since then, more robust and complex algorithms were presented to achieve the same objective. LOAM @cite_12 is currently one of the most popular method because of its high accuracy and ability to achieve real-time processing by running two different algorithms in parallel.
@cite_16 @cite_12
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This paper describes a general purpose, representation independent method for the accurate and computationally efficient registration of 3-D shapes including free-form curves and surfaces. The method handles the full six-degrees of freedom and is based on the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm, which requires only a procedure to find the closest point on a geometric entity to a given point. The ICP algorithm always converges monotonically to the nearest local minimum of a mean-square distance metric, and experience shows that the rate of convergence is rapid during the first few iterations. Therefore, given an adequate set of initial rotations and translations for a particular class of objects with a certain level of 'shape complexity', one can globally minimize the mean-square distance metric over all six degrees of freedom by testing each initial registration. For examples, a given 'model' shape and a sensed 'data' shape that represents a major portion of the model shape can be registered in minutes by testing one initial translation and a relatively small set of rotations to allow for the given level of model complexity. One important application of this method is to register sensed data from unfixtured rigid objects with an ideal geometric model prior to shape inspection. The described method is also useful for deciding fundamental issues such as the congruence (shape equivalence) of different geometric representations as well as for estimating the motion between point sets where the correspondences are not known. Experimental results show the capabilities of the registration algorithm on point sets, curves, and surfaces. We propose a real-time method for odometry and mapping using range measurements from a 2-axis lidar moving in 6-DOF. The problem is hard because the range measurements are received at different times, and errors in motion estimation can cause mis-registration of the resulting point cloud. To date, coherent 3D maps can be built by off-line batch methods, often using loop closure to correct for drift over time. Our method achieves both low-drift and low-computational complexity without the need for high accuracy ranging or inertial measurements. The key idea in obtaining this level of performance is the division of the complex problem of simultaneous localization and mapping, which seeks to optimize a large number of variables simultaneously, by two algorithms. One algorithm performs odometry at a high frequency but low fidelity to estimate velocity of the lidar. Another algorithm runs at a frequency of an order of magnitude lower for fine matching and registration of the point cloud. Combination of the two algorithms allows the method to map in real-time. The method has been evaluated by a large set of experiments as well as on the KITTI odometry benchmark. The results indicate that the method can achieve accuracy at the level of state of the art offline batch methods.