FoMo: A Multi-Season Dataset for Robot Navigation in For\^et Montmorency

TL;DR

The FoMo dataset provides a comprehensive multi-season collection of sensor data in a boreal forest, challenging existing SLAM and odometry methods with environmental variability over a year.

Contribution

This paper introduces the FoMo dataset, the first multi-season dataset in a boreal forest with diverse sensors and environmental conditions for advancing robot navigation research.

Findings

Seasonal changes significantly affect localization accuracy.

State-of-the-art SLAM methods struggle with environmental variability.

The dataset enables testing robustness of navigation algorithms across seasons.

Abstract

The For\^et Montmorency (FoMo) dataset is a comprehensive multi-season data collection, recorded over the span of one year in a boreal forest. Featuring a unique combination of on- and off-pavement environments with significant environmental changes, the dataset challenges established odometry and SLAM pipelines. Some highlights of the data include the accumulation of snow exceeding 1 m, significant vegetation growth in front of sensors, and operations at the traction limits of the platform. In total, the FoMo dataset includes over 64 km of six diverse trajectories, repeated during 12 deployments throughout the year. The dataset features data from one rotating and one hybrid solid-state lidar, a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar, full-HD images from a stereo camera and a wide lens monocular camera, as well as data from two IMUs. Ground Truth is calculated by post-processing three GNSS receivers mounted on the Uncrewed Ground Vehicle (UGV) and a static GNSS base station. Additional metadata, such as one measurement per minute from an on-site weather station, camera calibration intrinsics, and vehicle power consumption, is available for all sequences. To highlight the relevance of the dataset, we performed a preliminary evaluation of the robustness of a lidar-inertial, radar-gyro, and a visual-inertial localization and mapping techniques to seasonal changes. We show that seasonal changes have serious effects on the re-localization capabilities of the state-of-the-art methods. The dataset and development kit are available at https://fomo.norlab.ulaval.ca.