Fusion of RADAR/LADAR data for outdoor feature extraction, matching and localisation

Abstract

Autonomous navigation is an extant issue in service robot applications, requiring navigation in semi-structured environments such as town centres, ports or hospitals; highway applications, where lane following and platooning is necessary and military applications, where vehicles need to negotiate and traverse hostile, unstructured environments. This project is based on the purchase of a scanning millimetre wave RADAR, a high speed, scannable LADAR measurement unit, both specifically designed for outdoor, as well as in door use, and accompanying control and processing hardware and software. Feature acquisition experiments with the sensors have utilised existing technologies at NTU and SIMTech, including a golf cart vehicle test-bed, utility vehicle and various processors for data acquisition and processing.