Robust Planar Odometry Based on Symmetric Range Flow and Multiscan Alignment.

Abstract

This paper presents a dense method for estimating planar motion with a laser scanner. Starting from a symmetric representation of geometric consistency between scans, we derive a precise range flow constraint and express the motion of the scan observations as a function of the rigid motion of the scanner. In contrast to existing techniques, which align the incoming scan with either the previous one or the last selected keyscan, we propose a combined and efficient formulation to jointly align all these three scans at every iteration. This new formulation preserves the advantages of keyscan-based strategies but, is more robust against suboptimal selection of keyscans and the presence of moving objects. An extensive evaluation of our method is presented with simulated and real data in both static and dynamic environments. Results show that our approach is one order of magnitude faster and significantly more accurate than existing methods in all the conducted experiments. With a runtime of about one millisecond, it is suitable for those robotic applications that require planar odometry with low computational cost. The code is available online as a ROS package.