EFEAR-4D: Ego-Velocity Filtering for Efficient and Accurate 4D radar Odometry

Odometry is a crucial component for successfully implementing autonomous navigation, relying on sensors such as cameras, LiDARs and IMUs. However, these sensors may encounter challenges in extreme weather conditions, such as snowfall and fog. The emergence of FMCW radar technology offers the potential for robust perception in adverse conditions. As the latest generation of FWCW radars, the 4D mmWave radar provides point cloud with range, azimuth, elevation, and Doppler velocity information, despite inherent sparsity and noises in the point cloud. In this paper, we propose EFEAR-4D, an accurate, highly efficient, and learning-free method for large-scale 4D radar odometry estimation. EFEAR-4D exploits Doppler velocity information delicately for robust ego-velocity estimation, resulting in a highly accurate prior guess. EFEAR-4D maintains robustness against point-cloud sparsity and noises across diverse environments through dynamic object removal and effective region-wise feature extraction. Extensive experiments on two publicly available 4D radar datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art reliability and localization accuracy of EFEAR-4D under various conditions. Furthermore, we have collected a dataset following the same route but varying installation heights of the 4D radar, emphasizing the significant impact of radar height on point cloud quality - a crucial consideration for real-world deployments. Our algorithm and dataset will be available soon at https://github.com/CLASS-Lab/EFEAR-4D.

RH-Map: Online Map Construction Framework of Dynamic Objects Removal Based on Region-wise Hash Map Structure

Mobile robots operating in outdoor environments frequently encounter the issue of undesired traces left by dynamic objects and manifested as obstacles on the map, impeding the robot's ability to achieve accurate localization and navigation performance. To address this problem, we present a novel online map construction framework called RH-Map. Our framework leverages a newly proposed 3D region-wise hash map data structure for efficiently removing dynamic objects in real-time. It comprises a real-time dynamic object removal front-end module S2M-R and a lightweight back-end module for further removal. We conducted extensive experiments on the SemanticKITTI dataset, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method performs favorably compared to state-of-the-art approaches, and we further validated the proposed framework in real-world environment. The source code is released and available for the community.