Comparison of UAV LiDAR odometry of rotating and fixed velodyne platforms

Abstract

Three-dimensional LiDAR rangefinders are increasingly integrated into unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), due to their direct access to 3D information, their high accuracy and high refresh rate, and their tendency to be lightweight and cheaper. However, all commercial LiDARs can only offer a limited vertical resolution. To cope with this problem, a solution can be to rotate the LiDAR on an axis passing through its center, adding an additional degree of freedom and allowing more overlap, which significantly enlarges the sensor scope and allows having a complete spherical field of view (FOV). In this paper, we explore this solution in detail for drone's context, while making comparisons between the rotating and fixed configurations for a Multi-Layers LiDAR (MLL) of type Velodyne Puck Lite. We investigate its impact on the LiDAR Odometry (LO) process by comparing the resulting trajectories with the data of the two configurations, as well as, qualitative comparisons, of the resulting maps.