FSM: Correspondenceless scan-matching of panoramic 2D range scans

Recent years have seen the introduction of more affordable but less accurate 2D range sensors whose field of view is 2 pi. Scan-matching with these has been insufficiently researched, while being a challenge due to these sensors' increased measurement uncertainty. This paper proposes a real-time method for matching scans extracted from panoramic 2D LIDAR sensors. The method leverages properties of the Fourier transform which arise due to the periodicity of the range signal. Matching is performed in a correspondenceless manner. The proposed method outperforms established scan-matching methods in terms of pose accuracy and robustness in tests on public domain data, and over noise levels of commercially available sensors. The source code is available for download.