Water Hazard Detection Based on 3D LIDAR

Autonomous off-road navigation is a highly complicated task for a robot or unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) owing to the different kinds of obstacles it could encounter. In-particular, water hazards such as puddles and ponds are very common in outdoor environments and are hard to detect even with ranging devices due to the specular nature of reflection at the air water interface. In recent years, many researches to detect the water bodies have been done. But there still has been very little work on detecting bodies of water that could be navigation hazards, especially at night. In this paper, we used Velodyne HDL-64ES2 3D LIDAR to detect water hazard. The approach first analyzes the data format and transformation of 3D LIDAR, and then writes the data acquisition and visualizations algorithm, integrated data based on ICP algorithm. Finally according the intensity distribution identifies the water hazard. Experiments are carried out on the experimental car in campus, and results show the promising performance.