A Sensor-Aware Phenomenological Framework for Lidar Degradation Simulation and SLAM Robustness Evaluation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Felix, Doumegna Mawuto Koudjo, Yu, Xianjia, Zou, Zhuo, Westerlund, Tomi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914190079295488
author Felix, Doumegna Mawuto Koudjo
Yu, Xianjia
Zou, Zhuo
Westerlund, Tomi
author_facet Felix, Doumegna Mawuto Koudjo
Yu, Xianjia
Zou, Zhuo
Westerlund, Tomi
contents Lidar-based SLAM systems are highly sensitive to adverse conditions such as occlusion, noise, and field-of-view (FoV) degradation, yet existing robustness evaluation methods either lack physical grounding or do not capture sensor-specific behavior. This paper presents a sensor-aware, phenomenological framework for simulating interpretable lidar degradations directly on real point clouds, enabling controlled and reproducible SLAM stress testing. Unlike image-derived corruption benchmarks (e.g., SemanticKITTI-C) or simulation-only approaches (e.g., lidarsim), the proposed system preserves per-point geometry, intensity, and temporal structure while applying structured dropout, FoV reduction, Gaussian noise, occlusion masking, sparsification, and motion distortion. The framework features autonomous topic and sensor detection, modular configuration with four severity tiers (light--extreme), and real-time performance (less than 20 ms per frame) compatible with ROS workflows. Experimental validation across three lidar architectures and five state-of-the-art SLAM systems reveals distinct robustness patterns shaped by sensor design and environmental context. The open-source implementation provides a practical foundation for benchmarking lidar-based SLAM under physically meaningful degradation scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_08653
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Sensor-Aware Phenomenological Framework for Lidar Degradation Simulation and SLAM Robustness Evaluation
Felix, Doumegna Mawuto Koudjo
Yu, Xianjia
Zou, Zhuo
Westerlund, Tomi
Robotics
Lidar-based SLAM systems are highly sensitive to adverse conditions such as occlusion, noise, and field-of-view (FoV) degradation, yet existing robustness evaluation methods either lack physical grounding or do not capture sensor-specific behavior. This paper presents a sensor-aware, phenomenological framework for simulating interpretable lidar degradations directly on real point clouds, enabling controlled and reproducible SLAM stress testing. Unlike image-derived corruption benchmarks (e.g., SemanticKITTI-C) or simulation-only approaches (e.g., lidarsim), the proposed system preserves per-point geometry, intensity, and temporal structure while applying structured dropout, FoV reduction, Gaussian noise, occlusion masking, sparsification, and motion distortion. The framework features autonomous topic and sensor detection, modular configuration with four severity tiers (light--extreme), and real-time performance (less than 20 ms per frame) compatible with ROS workflows. Experimental validation across three lidar architectures and five state-of-the-art SLAM systems reveals distinct robustness patterns shaped by sensor design and environmental context. The open-source implementation provides a practical foundation for benchmarking lidar-based SLAM under physically meaningful degradation scenarios.
title A Sensor-Aware Phenomenological Framework for Lidar Degradation Simulation and SLAM Robustness Evaluation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08653