Automatic Extrinsic Rotational Calibration of LiDAR Sensors and Vehicle Orientation Estimation. Meyer, S. W., Chen, H., & Bevly, D. M. In IFAC-PapersOnLine, volume 54, of Modeling, Estimation and Control Conference MECC 2021, pages 424–429, January, 2021.
Automatic Extrinsic Rotational Calibration of LiDAR Sensors and Vehicle Orientation Estimation [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
Whether a vehicle is being used for an autonomous mission or in support of data collection and research, extrinsic calibration to align the vehicle’s sensors to a reference point on the vehicle is integral to ensuring that quality data is available to the system. This is particularly true for vision and distance sensors, such as LiDAR, which must be well-located with respect to the vehicle body before they can provide meaningful localization or environmental modeling assistance. This paper outlines an automatic approach for calibrating a LiDAR to the body of a ground vehicle using only the data from the LiDAR itself. This approach assumes that the LiDAR is able to sample at least a one meter square section of level ground, and that the vehicle travels along a straight section of roadway with a well-marked road edge at some point during the calibration, while closely following the trajectory of the road edge. This method has been able to automatically calibrate a LiDAR to yield 0.08 and 0.12 degrees of error in roll and pitch respectively when comparing estimated ground pitch and roll to the orientation estimates from a truth sensor.
@inproceedings{meyer_automatic_2021,
	series = {Modeling, {Estimation} and {Control} {Conference} {MECC} 2021},
	title = {Automatic {Extrinsic} {Rotational} {Calibration} of {LiDAR} {Sensors} and {Vehicle} {Orientation} {Estimation}},
	volume = {54},
	url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405896321022540},
	doi = {10.1016/j.ifacol.2021.11.210},
	abstract = {Whether a vehicle is being used for an autonomous mission or in support of data collection and research, extrinsic calibration to align the vehicle’s sensors to a reference point on the vehicle is integral to ensuring that quality data is available to the system. This is particularly true for vision and distance sensors, such as LiDAR, which must be well-located with respect to the vehicle body before they can provide meaningful localization or environmental modeling assistance. This paper outlines an automatic approach for calibrating a LiDAR to the body of a ground vehicle using only the data from the LiDAR itself. This approach assumes that the LiDAR is able to sample at least a one meter square section of level ground, and that the vehicle travels along a straight section of roadway with a well-marked road edge at some point during the calibration, while closely following the trajectory of the road edge. This method has been able to automatically calibrate a LiDAR to yield 0.08 and 0.12 degrees of error in roll and pitch respectively when comparing estimated ground pitch and roll to the orientation estimates from a truth sensor.},
	urldate = {2024-06-20},
	booktitle = {{IFAC}-{PapersOnLine}},
	author = {Meyer, Stephanie W. and Chen, Howard and Bevly, David M.},
	month = jan,
	year = {2021},
	keywords = {Autonomous Mobile Robots, Autonomous Vehicles, Sensing, Sensor calibration, Sensor integration, perception},
	pages = {424--429},
}

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