Direct motion estimation from a range scan sequence

Abstract

This article presents an innovative method to estimate the motion parameters of a mobile robot equipped with a radial laser range-finder. Our approach is based on the spatial and temporal linearization of the range function, which leads to a velocity constraint equation for the scanned points. Assuming that the mobile robot moves in a rigid environment, a least-squares formulation is employed to come up with the motion estimation as well as the motion vectors of the scanned points as they move from scan to scan in the sequence. This motion field can be very useful for a number of applications including detection and tracking of moving objects. Although this is a preliminary work, experimental results show that good results are achieved with both real and synthetic data. ©1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.