Using LMS-100 laser rangefinder for indoor metric map building

The design and implementation of a scan matching based map building method is described in this paper. The brand new LMS-100 laser rangefinder was used and evaluated for point measurement and metric map building. The official driver of the rangefinder was migrated to Linux in order to be integrated into the applied software framework. The measurement results were compared to data obtained by the widely used LMS-200 device. Both sensors were mounted on a commercially available PowerBot differentially driven mobile robot. It is shown that for indoor robotic applications, the LMS-100 is similarly well-usable to the LMS-200 with significant advantages in compactness and power consumption. Furthermore, from a map-building point of view, the LMS-100 performs better in dense environments with obstacles having complex reflective surfaces.