Scan registration for autonomous mining vehicles using 3D‐NDT

Abstract Scan registration is an essential subtask when building maps based on range finder data from mobile robots. The problem is to deduce how the robot has moved between consecutive scans, based on the shape of overlapping portions of the scans. This paper presents a new algorithm for registration of 3D data. The algorithm is a generalization and improvement of the normal distributions transform (NDT) for 2D data developed by Biber and Strasser, which allows for accurate registration using a memory‐efficient representation of the scan surface. A detailed quantitative and qualitative comparison of the new algorithm with the 3D version of the popular ICP (iterative closest point) algorithm is presented.…