A 3-D Scan Matching using Improved 3-D Normal Distributions Transform for Mobile Robotic Mapping

A 3D scan matching is an important component for sensor based localization and mapping by a mobile robot in natural environment. In this paper, the present authors propose a way to extend 2D normal distributions transform (NDT) scan matching method to 3D scan matching, and its improvement for faster processing time. This scan matching method divides scan into voxels, and approximates scan points in each cell into normal distribution. That matching time is O(N) with N of the number of input scan points. The authors describe in this paper, NDT for 3D scan points, its acceleration using the dual resolutions of NDT, and experiments of map building in large scale environments