Are We Ready for Radar to Replace Lidar in All-Weather Mapping and Localization?

• Published in: IEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 7; no. 4; pp. 10328 - 10335
• Main Authors: Burnett, Keenan, Wu, Yuchen, Yoon, David J., Schoellig, Angela P., Barfoot, Timothy D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.10.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Feature extraction; intelligent transportation systems; Laser radar; Lidar; Localization; Location awareness; Radar; range sensing; Sensors; Simultaneous localization and mapping; Snowstorms; Spaceborne radar; Weather
• ISSN: 2377-3766; 2377-3766
• DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2022.3192885

We present an extensive comparison between three topometric localization systems: radar-only, lidar-only, and a cross-modal radar-to-lidar system across varying seasonal and weather conditions using the Boreas dataset. Contrary to our expectations, our experiments showed that our lidar-only pipeline achieved the best localization accuracy even during a snowstorm. Our results seem to suggest that the sensitivity of lidar localization to moderate precipitation has been exaggerated in prior works. However, our radar-only pipeline was able to achieve competitive accuracy with a much smaller map. Furthermore, radar localization and radar sensors still have room to improve and may yet prove valuable in extreme weather or as a redundant backup system.