Ideal Angular Orientation of Selected 64-Channel Multi Beam Lidars for Mobile Mapping Systems

Bashar Alsadik

doi:10.3390/rs12030510

Abstract

Lidar technology is thriving nowadays for different applications mainly for autonomous navigation, mapping, and smart city technology. Lidars vary in different aspects and can be: multi beam, single beam, spinning, solid state, full 360 field of view FOV, single or multi pulse returns, and many other geometric and radiometric aspects. Users and developers in the mapping industry are continuously looking for new released Lidars having high properties of output density, coverage, and accuracy while keeping a lower cost. Accordingly, every Lidar type should be well evaluated for the final intended mapping aim. This evaluation is not easy to implement in practice because of the need to have all the investigated Lidars available in hand and integrated into a ready to use mapping system. Furthermore, to have a fair comparison; it is necessary to ensure the test applied in the same environment at the same travelling path among other conditions. In this paper, we are evaluating two state-of-the-art multi beam Lidar types: Ouster OS-1-64 and Hesai Pandar64 for mapping applications. The evaluation of the Lidar types is applied in a simulation environment which approximates reality. The paper shows the determination of the ideal orientation angle for the two Lidars by assessing the density, coverage, and accuracy and presenting clear performance quantifications and conclusions.

Highlights

Several Lidar manufacturers are found around the world where their business is growing with the high demand for the Lidar products in different industries
The experimental results and analysis of the two Lidar types of Hesai Pandar64 and Ouster OS-1-64 are shown in Sections 4.1 and 4.2, respectively
The ideal recommended angle for an mobile mapping system (MMS) using Ouster OS-1-64 Lidar is 35◦ (Figure 26), since it will ensure: (1) high coverage of the surrounding features, (2) high density for both ground and off-ground features, and (3) a relative accuracy of ≤10 cm for 95% of the scanned data

Summary

Introduction

Several Lidar manufacturers are found around the world where their business is growing with the high demand for the Lidar products in different industries. The major industry pushing Lidar companies for continuing development and being competitive is the thriving autonomous navigation/driving industry [1,2,3,4]. On the other hand, mapping companies are benefiting from this continuous development to use the Lidars as active scanning devices from the ground based or aerial based systems. The most common Lidar types are multi beam time-of-flight TOF scanners graduating from 8 up to 128 beams, which are spinning devices at a high rotation speed of 5–30 Hz [5,6,7,8]. Single beam Lidars are available in the market with high geometric properties of range accuracy, beam divergence, angular resolution, etc., such as Riegel VUX H [11]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion