Laser scan matching in polar coordinates with application to SLAM

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method for 2D laser scan matching called polar scan matching (PSM). The method belongs to the family of point to point matching approaches. Our method avoids searching for point associations by simply matching points with the same bearing. This association rule enables the construction of an algorithm faster than the iterative closest point (ICP). Firstly the PSM approach is tested with simulated laser scans. Then the accuracy of our matching algorithm is evaluated from real laser scans from known relative positions to establish a ground truth. Furthermore, to demonstrate the practical usability of the new PSM approach, experimental results from a Kalman filter implementation of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) are provided.