Design of Yaw and Tilt Alignment Inspection System for a Low-Resolution 3D LiDAR Using Planar Target

Abstract It is crucial to attach a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), a 3D sensor for a mobile platform such as robot and vehicle within the acceptable misalignment to detect the relative positions of surrounding obstacles accurately. This paper proposes a novel inspection method to estimate the yaw and tilt alignment of a LiDAR after the sensor attachment. The proposed method uses a planar target board to estimate the yaw and tilt angles of a low-resolution LiDAR with milli-degree precision. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the accuracy and precision of the proposed method with the designed test-bench that can control the reference pointing angle of the LiDAR from −10 to 10 degrees. The experiment results on Velodyne VLP-16, a low-resolution LiDAR with 16 channels, showed that the proposed system estimated the yaw and tilt angles within accuracy and precision of 0.1 degrees.