Do We Still Need to Work on Odometry for Autonomous Driving?

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a simple odometry algorithm using wheel encoder and gyroscope data, showing it can outperform more complex methods in accuracy and efficiency for autonomous driving.

Contribution

It demonstrates that a basic OG odometry algorithm can rival state-of-the-art methods in accuracy while being computationally cheaper, questioning the need for complex odometry research.

Findings

OG odometry outperforms radar-inertial SE(2) methods in accuracy.

OG odometry is computationally much more efficient.

Slippage significantly affects OG odometry accuracy.

Abstract

Over the past decades, a tremendous amount of work has addressed the topic of ego-motion estimation of moving platforms based on various proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensors. At the cost of ever-increasing computational load and sensor complexity, odometry algorithms have reached impressive levels of accuracy with minimal drift in various conditions. In this paper, we question the need for more research on odometry for autonomous driving by assessing the accuracy of one of the simplest algorithms: the direct integration of wheel encoder data and yaw rate measurements from a gyroscope. We denote this algorithm as Odometer-Gyroscope (OG) odometry. This work shows that OG odometry can outperform current state-of-the-art radar-inertial SE(2) odometry for a fraction of the computational cost in most scenarios. For example, the OG odometry is on top of the Boreas leaderboard with a relative translation error of 0.20%, while the second-best method displays an error of 0.26%. Lidar-inertial approaches can provide more accurate estimates, but the computational load is three orders of magnitude higher than the OG odometry. To further the analysis, we have pushed the limits of the OG odometry by purposely violating its fundamental no-slip assumption using data collected during a heavy snowstorm with different driving behaviours. Our conclusion shows that a significant amount of slippage is required to result in non-satisfactory pose estimates from the OG odometry.