Development of Autonomous Mobile Robot that is Capable of Navigation Using LIDAR in Rainy Situations

Abstract

A LIDAR is commonly used for autonomous mobile navigation. It detects raindrops under rainy situations since its output laser beams collide the drops. This influences against performance of the navigation, for example obstacle avoidance. In this study, we first investigate influence of rain against the LIDAR and then propose a coping method, which contains two ways, for reducing the rain's influence. The first way is a hardware-based coping method that is to add additional waterproof parts. The second way is a software-based coping method that is to remove raindrops from the LIDAR readings like a filtering algorithm. By using these methods, number of raindrop detection is significantly reduced. As a result, autonomous navigation can be performed in rainy situations and its performance is verified in a man-made environment.