Research on Autonomous Positioning Method for Inspection Robot Based on Distributed 2D LiDARs

To address the positioning problem during autonomous operation process under the automated vehicle inspection scenario for annual vehicle inspections. This paper proposes a method for autonomous positioning of inspection robot based on distributed two-dimensional LiDAR system. This method begins by utilizing cylinders stickered with retro-reflective tape to achieve high-precision joint calibration of the extrinsic parameters between distributed LiDARs and the robot-mounted LiDAR, thereby establishing a global coordinate system for the robot’s navigation system. Subsequently, this method utilizes the distributed LiDARs calibration results to fuse the vehicle point clouds, it then segments and extracts vehicle feature information to obtain the vehicle’s parking pose, which is transformed into the global coordinate system to realize autonomous positioning of the inspection robot. The experimental results show that the joint calibration accuracy of extrinsic parameters for multiple LiDARs can reach ±9mm, the positioning accuracy of the vertices of the vehicle’s bounding rectangle can achieve ±17mm, and the detection accuracy of the vehicle door opening angle can reach ±0.8°. This paper proposed method can improve the efficiency and accuracy of automated vehicle inspection.