Physics-based Simulation of Continuous-Wave LIDAR for Localization, Calibration and Tracking

TL;DR

This paper presents a physics-based simulation model for 2D continuous-wave LIDAR that accurately captures surface-light interactions, enabling automatic calibration and improved localization and tracking for autonomous robots.

Contribution

It introduces a novel physically plausible LIDAR model that incorporates surface interactions and uses gradient-based optimization for parameter estimation from real data.

Findings

Accurate simulation of LIDAR measurements considering surface interactions.

Automatic calibration of LIDAR model parameters.

Enhanced localization and tracking capabilities.

Abstract

Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensors play an important role in the perception stack of autonomous robots, supplying mapping and localization pipelines with depth measurements of the environment. While their accuracy outperforms other types of depth sensors, such as stereo or time-of-flight cameras, the accurate modeling of LIDAR sensors requires laborious manual calibration that typically does not take into account the interaction of laser light with different surface types, incidence angles and other phenomena that significantly influence measurements. In this work, we introduce a physically plausible model of a 2D continuous-wave LIDAR that accounts for the surface-light interactions and simulates the measurement process in the Hokuyo URG-04LX LIDAR. Through automatic differentiation, we employ gradient-based optimization to estimate model parameters from real sensor measurements.