Are Doppler Velocity Measurements Useful for Spinning Radar Odometry?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Lisus, Daniil, Burnett, Keenan, Yoon, David J., Poulton, Richard, Marshall, John, Barfoot, Timothy D.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Lisus, Daniil
Burnett, Keenan
Yoon, David J.
Poulton, Richard
Marshall, John
Barfoot, Timothy D.
author_facet Lisus, Daniil
Burnett, Keenan
Yoon, David J.
Poulton, Richard
Marshall, John
Barfoot, Timothy D.
contents Spinning, frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radars with 360 degree coverage have been gaining popularity for autonomous-vehicle navigation. However, unlike `fixed' automotive radar, commercially available spinning radar systems typically do not produce radial velocities due to the lack of repeated measurements in the same direction and the fundamental hardware setup. To make these radial velocities observable, we modified the firmware of a commercial spinning radar to use triangular frequency modulation. In this paper, we develop a novel way to use this modulation to extract radial Doppler velocity measurements from consecutive azimuths of a radar intensity scan, without any data association. We show that these noisy, error-prone measurements contain enough information to provide good ego-velocity estimates, and incorporate these estimates into different modern odometry pipelines. We extensively evaluate the pipelines on over 110 km of driving data in progressively more geometrically challenging autonomous-driving environments. We show that Doppler velocity measurements improve odometry in well-defined geometric conditions and enable it to continue functioning even in severely geometrically degenerate environments, such as long tunnels.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_01537
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Are Doppler Velocity Measurements Useful for Spinning Radar Odometry?
Lisus, Daniil
Burnett, Keenan
Yoon, David J.
Poulton, Richard
Marshall, John
Barfoot, Timothy D.
Robotics
Spinning, frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radars with 360 degree coverage have been gaining popularity for autonomous-vehicle navigation. However, unlike `fixed' automotive radar, commercially available spinning radar systems typically do not produce radial velocities due to the lack of repeated measurements in the same direction and the fundamental hardware setup. To make these radial velocities observable, we modified the firmware of a commercial spinning radar to use triangular frequency modulation. In this paper, we develop a novel way to use this modulation to extract radial Doppler velocity measurements from consecutive azimuths of a radar intensity scan, without any data association. We show that these noisy, error-prone measurements contain enough information to provide good ego-velocity estimates, and incorporate these estimates into different modern odometry pipelines. We extensively evaluate the pipelines on over 110 km of driving data in progressively more geometrically challenging autonomous-driving environments. We show that Doppler velocity measurements improve odometry in well-defined geometric conditions and enable it to continue functioning even in severely geometrically degenerate environments, such as long tunnels.
title Are Doppler Velocity Measurements Useful for Spinning Radar Odometry?
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01537