On registration methods for SLAM with low resolution LiDAR sensor

Abstract

Abstract Affordable light detection and ranging sensors are becoming available for tasks such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in robotics and autonomous driving; however, these sensors offer less quality data of lower resolution that hinders the performance of registration methods. The deep learning based approaches seem to be sensitive to these data flaws. Specifically, a state-of-the-art deep learning-based approach failed to produce meaningful results after several attempts to carry out transfer learning over a dataset collected indoors with one such affordable sensors. The paper introduces a hybrid approach combining two well-established registration techniques, the iterative closest point algorithm and the normal distributions transform that achieves good performance on the SLAM task over the same dataset.