Planar scan matching using incident angle

Abstract

The main contribution of this paper is a planar scan matching algorithm that makes use of the incident angle of a scan point as a feature to enhance the robustness to large relative transformations, particularly in orientation. A new definition of the incident angle is introduced and its consistency with respect to relative transformation between scans is demonstrated. A method that uses the Radial distance and Incident Angle (RIA) for scan alignment, that can efficiently estimate the relative transformation between two scans, is proposed. This approach is designed as a preprocessor for fine scan matching and it is able to pre-align scans that have large angular but limited translational displacement. Scans collected with aggressive robot motion in two typical indoor environments as well as benchmark datasets, are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of RIA when compared with a range of scan matching algorithms reported in the literature.