ORORA: Outlier-Robust Radar Odometry

Abstract

Radar sensors are emerging as solutions for perceiving surroundings and estimating ego-motion in extreme weather conditions. Unfortunately, radar measurements are noisy and suffer from mutual interference, which degrades the performance of feature extraction and matching, triggering imprecise matching pairs, which are referred to as outliers. To tackle the effect of outliers on radar odometry, a novel outlier-robust method called ORORA is proposed, which is an abbreviation of Outlier-RObust RAdar odometry. To this end, a novel decoupling-based method is proposed, which consists of graduated non-convexity (GNC)-based rotation estimation and anisotropic component-wise translation estimation (A-COTE). Furthermore, our method leverages the anisotropic characteristics of radar measurements, each of whose uncertainty along the azimuthal direction is somewhat larger than that along the radial direction. As verified in the public dataset, it was demonstrated that our proposed method yields robust ego-motion estimation performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/url-kaist/outlier-robust-radar-odometry .