RT Conference Proceedings
T1 Planar Odometry from a Radial Laser Scanner. A Range Flow-based Approach
A1 Jaimez, Mariano
A1 González-Monroy, Javier
A1 González-Jiménez, Antonio Javier
K1 Robótica
AB In this paper we present a fast and precise method to estimate the planar motion of a lidar from consecutive range scans. For every scanned point we formulate the range flow constraint equation in terms of the sensor velocity, andminimize a robust function of the resulting geometric constraints to obtain the motion estimate. Conversely to traditionalapproaches, this method does not search for correspondences but performs dense scan alignment based on the scan gradients,in the fashion of dense 3D visual odometry. The minimization problem is solved in a coarse-to-fine scheme to cope with large displacements, and a smooth filter based on the covariance of the estimate is employed to handle uncertainty in unconstraint scenarios (e.g. corridors). Simulated and real experiments havebeen performed to compare our approach with two prominent scan matchers and with wheel odometry. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach which, along with its very low computational cost (0.9 milliseconds on a  single CPU core), makes it suitable for those robotic applications that require planar odometry. For this purpose, we also provide the code so that the robotics community can benefit from it.
PB IEEE
YR 2016
FD 2016
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10630/11514
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10630/11514
LA eng
NO Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Spanish Government under project DPI2014-55826-R and the grant program FPI-MICINN 2012.
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 21 ene 2026