Radar-only localization and mapping for ground vehicle at high speed and for riverside boat

Abstract

The use of a rotating range sensor in high speed robotics creates distortions in the collected data. Such an effect is, in the majority of studies, ignored or considered as noise and then corrected, based on proprioceptive sensors or localization systems. In this study we consider that distortion contains the information about the vehicle's displacement. We propose to extract this information from distortion without any other information than exteroceptive sensor data. The only sensor used for this work is a panoramic Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar called K2Pi. No odometer, gyrometer or other proprioceptive sensor is used. The idea is to resort to velocimetry by analyzing the distortion of the measurements. As a result, the linear and angular velocities of the mobile robot are estimated and used to build, without any other sensor, the trajectory of the vehicle and then the radar map of outdoor environments. In this paper, radar-only localization and mapping results are presented for a ground vehicle and a riverbank application. This work can easily be extended to other slow rotating range sensors.