Are Doppler Velocity Measurements Useful for Spinning Radar Odometry?
<|reference_start|>Are Doppler Velocity Measurements Useful for Spinning Radar Odometry?: Spinning, frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radars with 360 degree coverage have been gaining popularity for autonomous-vehicle navigation. However, unlike 'fixed' automotive radar, commercially available spinning radar systems typically do not produce radial velocities due to the lack of repeated measurements in the same direction and the fundamental hardware setup. To make these radial velocities observable, we modified the firmware of a commercial spinning radar to use triangular frequency modulation. In this paper, we develop a novel way to use this modulation to extract radial Doppler velocity measurements from single raw radar intensity scans without any required data association. We show that these noisy, error-prone measurements contain enough information to provide good ego-velocity estimates, and incorporate these estimates into different modern odometry pipelines. We extensively evaluate the pipelines on over 110 km of driving data in progressively more geometrically challenging autonomous-driving environments. We show that Doppler velocity measurements improve odometry in well-defined geometric conditions and enable it to continue functioning even in severely geometrically degenerate environments, such as long tunnels.<|reference_end|>
@article{lisus2024are,
    title={Are Doppler Velocity Measurements Useful for Spinning Radar Odometry?},
    author={Daniil Lisus, Keenan Burnett, David J. Yoon, Richard Poulton, John
  Marshall, and Timothy D. Barfoot},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.01537},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.01537},
    primaryClass={cs.RO}
}