Simulating LIDAR sensors

Prologue

Simulation of LIDAR sensors concerns the process of simulating the sensing acquisition process of laser-range-lidar sensors by a computer program.

The way in which these sensors operate is by "active" perception, in other words, by touching the surface at which they are directed. Touching is implicitly performed by casting rays of photos (or rays of sound) and detecting the collisions that occur along their direction.

Active sensors are used extensively in robotics as they can provide measurements that are invariant to lighting conditions as well as denser depth acquisitions compared to passive (camera) sensors.

Available resources

Generally, in order to simulate the behavior of an active sensor through software, the proper way to do it is by employing "ray tracing", as is very well known in Computer Graphics in order to realistically render 3D scenes.

In this post, i would like to share some resources that i found in the internet which provide this functionality as well as some relative papers that employ simulation of active sensing. I hope it would be constructive and useful for all those out there that wish to play with these concepts ;).

Software

• http://www.blensor.org/: Blender Sensor Simulation basically provides a blender add-on that can simulate various standard laser sensors and control various parameters. In my opinion, just superb!

• http://www.kitware.com/media/html/ASyntheticLIDARScannerForVTK.html: the author provides a well-explained description of the provided c++ classes that can be used in VTK.

Papers

• http://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss05/p22.pdf: K. Lai, D. Fox, 3D Laser Scan Classification using Web Data and Domain Adaptation, Robotics: Science and Systems, 2009.

• http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Podolak_2006_APS/symmpaper.pdf: Podulak et al., A Planar Relfective Symmetry Transform for 3D Shapes, SIGGRAPH, 2006.

• https://diglib.eg.org/EG/DL/WS/3DOR/3DOR13/PDF/081-088.pdf: Sipiran et al., Large Scale Shape Retrieval using Simulated Range Images, Eurographics Workshop on 3D Object Retrieval: SHREC Contest, 2013.

Tutorials

• http://kos.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/icar2013/: Large Scale 3D Point Cloud Processing Tutorial, 2013. Organized by Andreas Nuchter and Thomas Wiemann.

I will try to keep this list updated as i come upon relevant material-resources. Any such proposal will be greatly appreciated :).