Automatic Calibration of Spinning Actuated Lidar Internal Parameters

Abstract

Actuated lidar, where a scanning lidar is combined with an actuation mechanism to scan a 3D volume rather than a single line, has been used heavily on a wide variety of field robotics applications. Common ex- amples of actuated lidar include spinning/rolling and nodding/pitching configurations. Due to construction of actuated lidar, the center of rotation of the lidar mirror may not coincide with the center of rotation of the actu- ation mechanism. In order to triangulate a precise point cloud representation of the environment, the centers of rotation must be brought into alignment using a suitable calibration procedure. We refer to this problem as esti- mating the internal parameters of actuated lidar. In this work, we focus on spinning/rolling lidar and present a fully automated algorithm for calibration using generic scenes without the need for specialized calibration tar- gets. The algorithm is evaluated on a range of real and synthetic data and is shown to be robust, accurate and has a large basin of convergence.