Narrowing your FOV with SOLiD: Spatially Organized and Lightweight Global Descriptor for FOV-constrained LiDAR Place Recognition

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel, lightweight LiDAR place recognition method designed specifically for narrow FOV scenarios, improving robustness in robot navigation despite limited sensor views.

Contribution

It presents a spatially organized descriptor based on range-elevation and azimuth-elevation bins, addressing rotational changes and initial heading determination in FOV-constrained environments.

Findings

Effective in single-session, multi-session, and multi-robot scenarios.

First method to specifically address restricted FOV in LiDAR place recognition.

Codes and supplementary materials are publicly available.

Abstract

We often encounter limited FOV situations due to various factors such as sensor fusion or sensor mount in real-world robot navigation. However, the limited FOV interrupts the generation of descriptions and impacts place recognition adversely. Therefore, we suffer from correcting accumulated drift errors in a consistent map using LiDAR-based place recognition with limited FOV. Thus, in this paper, we propose a robust LiDAR-based place recognition method for handling narrow FOV scenarios. The proposed method establishes spatial organization based on the range-elevation bin and azimuth-elevation bin to represent places. In addition, we achieve a robust place description through reweighting based on vertical direction information. Based on these representations, our method enables addressing rotational changes and determining the initial heading. Additionally, we designed a lightweight and fast approach for the robot's onboard autonomy. For rigorous validation, the proposed method was tested across various LiDAR place recognition scenarios (i.e., single-session, multi-session, and multi-robot scenarios). To the best of our knowledge, we report the first method to cope with the restricted FOV. Our place description and SLAM codes will be released. Also, the supplementary materials of our descriptor are available at \texttt{\url{https://sites.google.com/view/lidar-solid}}.