Automatic Calibration of Spinning Actuated Lidar Internal Parameters

Actuated lidar, where a scanning lidar is combined with an actuation mechanism to scan a 3D volume rather than a single line, has been used heavily on a wide variety of field robotics applications. Common examples of actuated lidar include spinning/rolling and nodding/pitching configurations. Due to construction of actuated lidar, the center of rotation of the lidar mirror may not coincide with the center of rotation of the actuation mechanism. In order to triangulate a precise point cloud representation of the environment, the centers of rotation must be brought into alignment using a suitable calibration procedure. We refer to this problem as estimating the internal parameters of actuated lidar. In this work, we focus on spinning/rolling lidar and present a fully automated algorithm for calibration using generic scenes without the need for specialized calibration targets. The algorithm is evaluated on a range of real and synthetic data and is shown to be robust, accurate and has a large basin of convergence.