Automatic calibration of a stationary network of laser range finders by matching movement trajectories

Laser based detection and tracking of persons can be used for numerous tasks. While a single laser range finder (LRF) is sufficient for detecting and tracking persons on a mobile robot platform, a network of multiple LRF is required to observe persons in larger spaces. Calibrating multiple LRF into a global coordinate system is usually done by hand in a time consuming procedure. An automatic calibration mechanism for such a sensor network is introduced in this paper. Without the need of prior knowledge about the environment, this mechanism is able to obtain the positions and orientations of all LRF in a global coordinate system. By comparing person tracks, determined for each individual LRF unit and matching them, constrains between the LRF units can be calculated. We are able to estimate the poses of all LRF by resolving these constrains. We evaluate and compare our method to the current state of the art approach methodically and experimentally. Experiments show that our calibration approach outperforms this approach.