Automatic Calibration of Spinning Actuated Lidar Internal Parameters - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Automatic Calibration of Spinning Actuated Lidar Internal Parameters

Hatem Said Alismail and Brett Browning
Journal Article, Journal of Field Robotics: Special Issue: Calibration for Field Robotics, Vol. 32, No. 5, pp. 723 - 747, August, 2015

Abstract

Actuated lidar, where a scanning lidar is combined with an actuation mechanism to scan a 3D volume rather than a single line, has been used heavily on a wide variety of field robotics applications. Common ex- amples of actuated lidar include spinning/rolling and nodding/pitching configurations. Due to construction of actuated lidar, the center of rotation of the lidar mirror may not coincide with the center of rotation of the actu- ation mechanism. In order to triangulate a precise point cloud representation of the environment, the centers of rotation must be brought into alignment using a suitable calibration procedure. We refer to this problem as esti- mating the internal parameters of actuated lidar. In this work, we focus on spinning/rolling lidar and present a fully automated algorithm for calibration using generic scenes without the need for specialized calibration tar- gets. The algorithm is evaluated on a range of real and synthetic data and is shown to be robust, accurate and has a large basin of convergence.

Notes
The provided manuscript is a draft. The authoritative version can be found on the publishers website. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rob.21543/abstract

BibTeX

@article{Alismail-2015-17166,
author = {Hatem Said Alismail and Brett Browning},
title = {Automatic Calibration of Spinning Actuated Lidar Internal Parameters},
journal = {Journal of Field Robotics: Special Issue: Calibration for Field Robotics},
year = {2015},
month = {August},
volume = {32},
number = {5},
pages = {723 - 747},
}