Temporal Stability of the Velodyne HDL-64E S2 Scanner for High Accuracy Scanning Applications

Abstract: The temporal stability and static calibration and analysis of the Velodyne HDL‑64E S2 scanning LiDAR system is discussed and analyzed. The mathematical model for measurements for the HDL-64E S2 scanner is updated to include misalignments between the angular encoder and scanner axis of rotation, which are found to be a marginally significant source of error. It is reported that the horizontal and vertical laser offsets cannot reliably be obtained with the current calibration model due to their high correlation with the horizontal and vertical offsets. By analyzing observations from two separate HDL-64E S2 scanners it was found that the temporal stability of the horizontal angle offset is near the quantization level of the encoder, but the vertical angular offset, distance offset and distance scale are slightly larger than expected. This is felt to be due to long term variations in the scanner range, whose root cause is as of yet unidentified. Nevertheless, a temporally averaged calibration dataset for each of the scanners resulted in a 25% improvement in the 3D planar misclosure residual RMSE over the standard factory calibration model.