Mapping of the environment with a high resolution ground-based radar imager

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present the potential of microwave radar as a high resolution ground-based imager, in order to build radar maps in environmental applications. A new radar sensor named K2Pi, based on the principle of Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FM-CW) is described. In order to build the radar maps, the R-SLAM algorithm has been developed. It is based on Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) principles. The global radar map is constructed through a data merging process, using scan matching of radar image sequences. First results obtained in different environments are presented, which show the ability of the microwave radar to deal with unstructured and extended environments, and to build consistent maps.Index Terms-Environmental mapping, microwave radar, simultaneous localization and mapping.

GHz series production short range radar for highly automated driving applications

“…by considering a Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM)-based approach [7], [8]. However, in this paper we will focus on the first issue, what kind of landmarks may be detected with these series radar sensors.…”

Odometry with a Panoramic Radar in Outdoor Environment: use of a Radon-Fourier Transform for the Estimation of the Move without External Sensors

“…Whatever is the method chosen for computed spectrums, the panoramic maps are highly distorted by the move [21,23]: Doppler alters the frequencies estimated but the worse distortion is on the origin point of the rays which change with the move from ray to ray: each radar ray has its own initial point located on the trajectory. The correction of those distortions is a task which requires the knowledge of the move's parameters with two possible solutions.…”

“…A task which is always unavoidable is the control of the move in the environment, from the simplest obstacle detection or tracking [37,2,25,12] to the creation of a map or the correlation with an existing map, the mapping and map matching [19,38,26,32,15]. In robotic applications, the localization in the environment and the mapping could be done either by distinct sensors or either be the results of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) algorithms [31,28,8,14] which allow to step by step build a map and locate the robot from a known starting point [23,34].…”

Radar SLAM using visual features

“…Today, SLAM is a fairly well-studied problem with solutions that are reaching some level of maturity [8,9]. SLAM has been performed in a wide variety of environments such as indoors [10], in urban [11][12][13][14] and rural areas [13,15], underwater [16,17] and in the air [18] and the platform is usually equipped with a multitude of sensors such as lasers, cameras, inertial measurement units, wheel encoders, etc. In this work, we will use only the radar sensor of a naval vessel to perform SLAM in a maritime environment.…”

“…Lately, microwave radars have been used in SLAM experiments but now using a landmark free approach. In [13], SLAM was performed in both urban and rural areas by aligning the latest radar scan with the radar map using 3D correlations to estimate the relative movements of the vehicle. The radar map was constructed by consecutively adding the latest aligned radar scan to the previous scans.…”