Planar landmark detection using a specific arrangement of LIDAR scanners

All terrestrial applications which depend on a GPS receiver for a precise position fix suffer in the urban environments. A Terrestrial Mobile Mapping System is one such application. We have been working on a Terrestrial LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scanner (or Laser scanner) based Mobile Mapping System (MMS) in our laboratory. To aid the localization of our moving mapping platform (a land vehicle), we opted to use the technology similar to SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). Our primary focus is on the urban canyons where the GPS signal perturbations are highly likely to occur. The main characteristic of an urban canyon is the planar sections of the man made buildings. In this paper, we present a specific arrangement of the LIDAR scanners tailored to extract the planar landmarks. This is the first important step in improving the localization functionality. Here we discuss about our new LIDAR system configuration and the design justifications along with the obtained results of planar landmark extraction.