OORD: The Oxford Offroad Radar Dataset

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Oxford Offroad Radar Dataset (OORD), a comprehensive collection of radar, GPS, and IMU data from rugged Scottish highlands, designed to advance offroad autonomous vehicle research.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive offroad radar dataset with GPS/INS data, including benchmark results and open-source tools for radar place recognition in rugged environments.

Findings

Radar data collected in extreme weather conditions

Benchmark performance of open-source radar place recognition systems

Release of neural network models and training weights

Abstract

There is a growing academic interest as well as commercial exploitation of millimetre-wave scanning radar for autonomous vehicle localisation and scene understanding. Although several datasets to support this research area have been released, they are primarily focused on urban or semi-urban environments. Nevertheless, rugged offroad deployments are important application areas which also present unique challenges and opportunities for this sensor technology. Therefore, the Oxford Offroad Radar Dataset (OORD) presents data collected in the rugged Scottish highlands in extreme weather. The radar data we offer to the community are accompanied by GPS/INS reference - to further stimulate research in radar place recognition. In total we release over 90GiB of radar scans as well as GPS and IMU readings by driving a diverse set of four routes over 11 forays, totalling approximately 154km of rugged driving. This is an area increasingly explored in literature, and we therefore present and release examples of recent open-sourced radar place recognition systems and their performance on our dataset. This includes a learned neural network, the weights of which we also release. The data and tools are made freely available to the community at https://oxford-robotics-institute.github.io/oord-dataset.