When Geometry is not Enough: Using Reflector Markers in Lidar SLAM

Abstract

Lidar-based SLAM systems perform well in a wide range of circumstances by relying on the geometry of the environment. However, even mature and reliable approaches struggle when the environment contains structureless areas such as long hallways. To allow the use of lidar-based SLAM in such environments, we propose to add reflector markers in specific locations that would otherwise be difficult. We present an algorithm to reliably detect these markers and two approaches to fuse the detected markers with geometry-based scan matching. The performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated on real-world datasets from several industrial environments.