Loop closure detection using small-sized signatures from 3D LIDAR data

This article presents a technique for loop closure detection using lidar data for autonomous mobile robots. The technique consists in extracting, indexing and matching a set of small-sized signatures from lidar data. These signatures are based on histograms of local surface normals for 3D point clouds. As the robot moves, some histograms are automatically selected as key-histograms and histograms of newly acquired lidar scans are matched to the key-histograms in order to detect loop-closures. Results with real 3D lidar data validate the proposed technique.