Mobile robot motion estimation from a range scan sequence

This paper presents a innovative algorithm to estimate the motion parameters of a mobile robot equipped with a radial laser rangefinder. Our method is based on the spatial and temporal linearization of the range function, which leads to a velocity constraint equation for the scanned points. The proposed formulation computes the motion vectors of the scanned points as they move from scan to scan in the sequence. This motion field can be very useful in a number of applications including detection and tracking of moving objects. Experimental results are presented, showing that good results are achieved with both real and synthetic data