Bore-sight calibration of multiple laser range finders for kinematic 3D laser scanning systems

The Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technique has been used for autonomous navigation of mobile systems; now, its applications have been extended to 3D data acquisition of indoor environments. In order to reconstruct 3D scenes of indoor space, the kinematic 3D laser scanning system, developed herein, carries three laser range finders (LRFs): one is mounted horizontally for system-position correction and the other two are mounted vertically to collect 3D point-cloud data of the surrounding environment along the system’s trajectory. However, the kinematic laser scanning results can be impaired by errors resulting from sensor misalignment. In the present study, the bore-sight calibration of multiple LRF sensors was performed using a specially designed double-deck calibration facility, which is composed of two half-circle-shaped aluminum frames. Moreover, in order to automatically achieve point-to-point correspondences between a scan point and the target center, a V-shaped target was designed as well. The bore-sight calibration parameters were estimated by a constrained least squares method, which iteratively minimizes the weighted sum of squares of residuals while constraining some highly-correlated parameters. The calibration performance was analyzed by means of a correlation matrix. After calibration, the visual inspection of mapped data and residual calculation confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed calibration approach.