Odometry is crucial for the navigation of autonomous vehicles in unknown environments. While cameras and LiDARs are commonly used to estimate the ego-motion of a vehicle, these sensors face limitations under bad lighting and severe weather conditions. Automotive radars overcome these challenges, but radar point clouds are generally sparse and noisy, making it difficult to identify useful features within a radar scan. In this paper, we address the problem of ego-motion estimation using a single automotive radar sensor. We propose a simple, yet effective, heuristic-based method to extract the ground plane from single radar scans and perform ground plane matching between consecutive scans. Additionally, we perform a windowed factor-graph optimization of the poses together with the ground plane, improving the accuracy of the pose estimation. We put our work to the test using the 4DRadarDataset. Our findings illustrate the state-of-the-art performance of our odometry approach compared to existing alternatives that use radar point clouds.

Odometry and mapping play a pivotal role in the navigation of autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we address the problem of pose estimation and map creation using only radar sensors. We focus on two odometry estimation approaches followed by a mapping step. The first one is a new point-to-point ICP approach that leverages the velocity information provided by 3D radar sensors. The second one is advantageous for 2D radars with a low number of samples, and particularly useful for scenarios where the sensor is being blocked by large dynamic obstacles. It exploits a constant velocity filter and the measured Doppler velocities to estimate the vehicle’s ego-motion. We enrich this with a filtering step to improve the accuracy of the points in the resulting map. We put our work to the test using the View of Delft and NuScenes datasets, which involve 3D and 2D radar sensors. Our findings illustrate state-of-the-art performance of our odometry techniques in terms of accuracy when compared to existing alternatives. Moreover, we demonstrate that our map filtering methodology achieves higher similarity rates than the raw unfiltered map when benchmarked against a corresponding LiDAR map.

Robots and autonomous vehicles should be aware of what happens in their surroundings. The segmentation and tracking of moving objects are essential for reliable path planning, including collision avoidance. We investigate this estimation task for vehicles using radar sensing. We address moving instance tracking in sparse radar point clouds to enhance scene interpretation. We propose a learning-based radar tracker incorporating temporal offset predictions to enable direct center-based association and enhance segmentation performance by including additional motion cues. We implement attention-based tracking for sparse radar scans to include appearance features and enhance performance. The final association combines geometric and appearance features to overcome the limitations of center-based tracking to associate instances reliably. Our approach shows an improved performance on the moving instance tracking benchmark of the RadarScenes dataset compared to the current state of the art.