Ford Campus vision and lidar data set

In this paper we describe a data set collected by an autonomous ground vehicle testbed, based upon a modified Ford F-250 pickup truck. The vehicle is outfitted with a professional (Applanix POS-LV) and consumer (Xsens MTi-G) inertial measurement unit, a Velodyne three-dimensional lidar scanner, two push-broom forward-looking Riegl lidars, and a Point Grey Ladybug3 omnidirectional camera system. Here we present the time-registered data from these sensors mounted on the vehicle, collected while driving the vehicle around the Ford Research Campus and downtown Dearborn, MI, during November-December 2009. The vehicle path trajectory in these data sets contains several large-and small-scale loop closures, which should be useful for testing various state-of-the-art computer vision and simultaneous localization and mapping algorithms.