Calibration of a Rotating or Revolving Platform with a LiDAR Sensor

Perceiving its environment in 3D is an important ability for a modern robot. Today, this is often done using LiDARs which come with a strongly limited field of view (FOV), however. To extend their FOV, the sensors are mounted on driving vehicles in several different ways. This allows 3D perception even with 2D LiDARs if a corresponding localization system or technique is available. Another popular way to gain most information of the scanners is to mount them on a rotating carrier platform. In this way, their measurements in different directions can be collected and transformed into a common frame, in order to achieve a nearly full spherical perception. However, this is only possible if the kinetic chains of the platforms are known exactly, that is, if the LiDAR pose w.r.t. to its rotation center is well known. The manual measurement of these chains is often very cumbersome or sometimes even impossible to do with the necessary precision. Our paper proposes a method to calibrate the extrinsic LiDAR parameters by decoupling the rotation from the full six degrees of freedom transform and optimizing both separately. Thus, one error measure for the orientation and one for the translation with known orientation are minimized subsequently with a combination of a consecutive grid search and a gradient descent. Both error measures are inferred from spherical calibration targets. Our experiments with the method suggest that the main influences on the calibration results come from the the distance to the calibration targets, the accuracy of their center point estimation and the search grid resolution. However, our proposed calibration method improves the extrinsic parameters even with unfavourable configurations and from inaccurate initial pose guesses.