Doppler-Aware Odometry from FMCW Scanning Radar

Abstract

This work explores Doppler information from a millimetre-Wave (mm-W) Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) scanning radar to make odometry estimation more robust and accurate. Firstly, doppler information is added to the scan masking process to enhance correlative scan matching. Secondly, we train a Neural Network (NN) for regressing forward velocity directly from a single radar scan; we fuse this estimate with the correlative scan matching estimate and show improved robustness to bad estimates caused by challenging environment geometries, e.g. narrow tunnels. We test our method with a novel custom dataset which is released with this work at https://ori.ox.ac.uk/publications/datasets.