Ground Penetrating Radar-Assisted Multimodal Robot Odometry Using Subsurface Feature Matrix

Localization of robots using subsurface features observed by ground-penetrating radar (GPR) enhances and adds robustness to common sensor modalities, as subsurface features are less affected by weather, seasons, and surface changes. We introduce an innovative multimodal odometry approach using inputs from GPR, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and a wheel encoder. To efficiently address GPR signal noise, we introduce an advanced feature representation called the subsurface feature matrix (SFM). The SFM leverages frequency domain data and identifies peaks within radar scans. Additionally, we propose a novel feature matching method that estimates GPR displacement by aligning SFMs. The integrations from these three input sources are consolidated using a factor graph approach to achieve multimodal robot odometry. Our method has been developed and evaluated with the CMU-GPR public dataset, demonstrating improvements in accuracy and robustness with real-time performance in robotic odometry tasks.