Performance Evaluation of Various 2-D Laser Scanners for Mobile Robot Map Building and Localization

Abstract

A study has been carried out to investigate the performance of various 2-D laser scanners, which influence the map building quality and localization performance for a mobile robot. Laser scanners are increasingly used in automation and robotic applications. They are widely used as sensing devices for map building and localization in navigation of mobile robot. Laser scanners are commercially available, but there is very little published information on the performance comparison of various laser scanners on the mobile robot map building and localization. Hence, this work studies the performance by comparing four laser scanners which are Hokuyo URG04LX-UG01, Hokuyo UTM30LX, SICK TIM551 and Pepperl Fuchs ODM30M. The results, which are verified by comparison with the reference experimental data, indicated that the angle resolution and sensing range of laser scanner are key factors affecting the map building quality and position estimation for localization. From the experiment, laser scanner with 0.25° angle resolution is optimum enough for building a map of sufficient quality for good localization performance. With 30meter of sensing range, a laser scanner can also result in better localization performance, especially in big environment.