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This paper evaluates the performance of three existing radar odometry methods in challenging subarctic environments with high tilt dynamics, where flat ground assumptions are violated. To address these limitations, the authors introduce a novel radar-inertial odometry approach that incorporates tilt-proximity submap search and a hard threshold for vertical displacement. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on an urban baseline and a 0.3% improvement over existing methods on a dynamic subarctic trajectory.
Standard radar odometry falters in subarctic terrain, but a new tilt-aware radar-inertial method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy even with pitch variations up to 13 degrees.
Rotating FMCW radar odometry methods often assume flat ground conditions. While this assumption is sufficient in many scenarios, including urban environments or flat mining setups, the highly dynamic terrain of subarctic environments poses a challenge to standard feature extraction and state estimation techniques. This paper benchmarks three existing radar odometry methods under demanding conditions, exhibiting up to 13{\deg} in pitch and 4{\deg} in roll difference between consecutive scans, with absolute pitch and roll reaching 30{\deg} and 8{\deg}, respectively. Furthermore, we propose a novel radar-inertial odometry method utilizing tilt-proximity submap search and a hard threshold for vertical displacement between scan points and the estimated axis of rotation. Experimental results demonstrate a state-of-the-art performance of our method on an urban baseline and a 0.3% improvement over the second-best comparative method on a 2-kilometer-long dynamic trajectory. Finally, we analyze the performance of the four evaluated methods on a complex radar sequence characterized by high lateral slip and a steep ditch traversal.
