Continuous 3D Sweep Matching with a Spinning 2D Laser

The vehicle trajectory is estimated using laser range scans generated by a SICK LMS291 rotating at 0.5Hz mounted on a skid-steer loader. Because the spinning laser requires one second to sweep a full 3D scan, the raw point clouds are highly distorted by the vehicle motion. The sweep-matching algorithm is able to continuously correct the motion-distorted point cloud to produce a 6DoF trajectory estimate without the use of any other sensors. Details of the algorithm are published by Michael Bosse and Robert Zlot in the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2009 under the title “Continuous 3D Scan-Matching with a Spinning 2D Laser”.