Lidar-level localization with radar? The CFEAR approach to accurate, fast and robust large-scale radar odometry in diverse environments
This paper presents an accurate, highly efficient, and learning-free method for large-scale odometry estimation using spinning radar, empirically found to generalize well across very diverse environments – outdoors, from urban to woodland, and indoors in warehouses and mines - without changing parameters. Our method integrates motion compensation within a sweep with one-to-many scan registration that minimizes distances between nearby oriented surface points and mitigates outliers with a robust loss function. Extending our previous approach CFEAR, we present an in-depth investigation on a wider range of data sets, quantifying the importance of filtering, resolution, registration cost and loss functions, keyframe history, and motion compensation. We present a new solving strategy and configuration that overcomes previous issues with sparsity and bias, and improves our state-of-the-art by 38 outperforming radar SLAM and approaching lidar SLAM. The most accurate configuration achieves 1.09 fastest achieves 1.79
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