A Normal Distribution Transform-Based Radar Odometry Designed For Scanning and Automotive Radars

TL;DR

This paper introduces a versatile radar odometry method based on NDT that effectively handles both scanning and automotive radars, achieving high accuracy and outperforming existing methods on public datasets.

Contribution

The proposed radar odometry method is adaptable to both radar types and demonstrates significant improvements over state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy.

Findings

Reduces translational error by 51% and 30% for scanning and automotive radars.

Reduces rotational error by 17% and 29% for scanning and automotive radars.

Achieves centimeter-level accuracy comparable to lidar odometry.

Abstract

Existing radar sensors can be classified into automotive and scanning radars. While most radar odometry (RO) methods are only designed for a specific type of radar, our RO method adapts to both scanning and automotive radars. Our RO is simple yet effective, where the pipeline consists of thresholding, probabilistic submap building, and an NDT-based radar scan matching. The proposed RO has been tested on two public radar datasets: the Oxford Radar RobotCar dataset and the nuScenes dataset, which provide scanning and automotive radar data respectively. The results show that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art RO using either automotive or scanning radar by reducing translational error by 51% and 30%, respectively, and rotational error by 17% and 29%, respectively. Besides, we show that our RO achieves centimeter-level accuracy as lidar odometry, and automotive and scanning RO have similar accuracy.