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Zebedee: Design of a Spring-Mounted 3-D Range Sensor with Application to

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DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2012.2200990

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 28, NO. 5, OCT 2012
Zebedee: Design of a Spring-Mounted 3-D Range
Sensor with Application to Mobile Mapping
Michael Bosse, Robert Zlot, and Paul Flick.
Abstract—Three-dimensional perception is a key technology
for many robotics applications including obstacle detection,
mapping, and localization. There exist a number of sensors and
techniques for acquiring 3D data, many of which have particular
utility for various robotic tasks. We introduce a new design for a
3D sensor system, constructed from a 2D range scanner coupled
with a passive linkage mechanism, such as a spring. By mounting
the other end of the passive linkage mechanism to a moving
body, disturbances resulting from accelerations and vibrations
of the body propel the 2D scanner in an irregular fashion,
thereby extending the device’s field of view outside of its standard
scanning plane. The proposed 3D sensor system is advantageous
due to its mechanical simplicity, mobility, low weight, and
relatively low cost. We analyze a particular implementation
of the proposed device, which we call Zebedee, consisting of
a 2D time-of-flight laser range scanner rigidly coupled to an
inertial measurement unit and mounted on a spring. The unique
configuration of the sensor system motivates unconventional and
specialized algorithms to be developed for data processing. As
an example application, we describe a novel 3D simultaneous
localization and mapping solution in which Zebedee is mounted
on a moving platform. Using a motion capture system, we have
verified the positional accuracy of the sensor trajectory. The
results demonstrate that the six degree of freedom trajectory of a
passive spring-mounted range sensor can be accurately estimated
from laser range data and industrial-grade inertial measurements
in real-time, and that a quality 3D point cloud map can be
generated concurrently using the same data.
Index Terms—Range Sensing, SLAM, Mapping.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Three-dimensional perception is essential to many mobile
robotic systems, as robots are increasingly required to operate
in unstructured environments and interact safely and effec-
tively with humans, other vehicles, and their environment. 3D
data acquisition is also of vital importance for traditionally
non-robotic (but in some cases automatable) tasks such as
surveying, object scanning, mobile mapping, and gaming.
There are a number of ways to acquire 3D data, such as
scanning lidar or radar, flash lidar, stereo vision, imaging
sonar, and structured light triangulation. The variety of so-
lutions that are in common use is clear evidence that no
single solution is suitable for all applications. The existing
technologies differ in many ways, but the characteristics of
The authors are with the Autonomous Systems Laboratory, CSIRO
ICT Centre, Brisbane, Australia (e-mail: Mike.Bosse@csiro.au,
Robert.Zlot@csiro.au, Paul.Flick@csiro.au).
Published version available on http://ieeexplore.ieee.org
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TRO.2012.2200990
c 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from
IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media,
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or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
1
(a) CAD model (b) Vehicle mounted
Fig. 1: Vehicle mounted Zebedee design. (a) A CAD model of a dual-spring
version of the 3D range-sensing system. The sensor head includes a 2D laser
and IMU, which is connected via a pair of springs to a moving platform. (b)
Zebedee mounted on the front of an automated John Deere Gator TE electric
vehicle.
primary relevance for robotics are typically accuracy, range,
resolution, field of view, operating conditions, cost, weight,
power consumption, and complexity. Aiming to achieve a good
balance of these properties, we propose a new design concept
for a 3D sensor system in which a 2D range scanner is coupled
to a passive linkage mechanism, such as a spring (Figures 1
and 2). By mounting the device on a moving platform, such
as an autonomous vehicle, accelerations and vibrations of that
platform are transferred by the reactive linkage mechanism to
motion of the 2D scanner with respect to the platform. The
induced motion has the effect of rotating the 2D scanner’s scan
plane, thereby increasing the field of view of the device with
respect to the environment to achieve 3D coverage.
Allowing a range sensor to move about relatively freely and
non-deterministically is counter to the traditional practice in
robotics and mobile mapping. Typically, sensors are mounted
rigidly to the moving platform, and motion is assumed to
follow the trajectory of the platform (offset by a known and
static rigid transformation). In some cases, suspensions or
gimbals are used to stabilize the sensor mount and remove the
effects of high frequency accelerations due to rough terrain,
engine vibration, or other unwanted disturbances [1, 2]. In
contrast, our design amplifies the effects of such accelerations
and exploits the resulting motion to increase the sensor field
of view along an additional scanning dimension.
Though our proposed design generally encompasses any
type of range sensor, in practice we focus on 2D time-of-
flight lidars. Two dimensional laser scanners are ubiquitous
in the field of robotics: models that provide reasonable range,
resolution, and accuracy in a small, lightweight package and
operate in a wide range of environmental conditions are
commercially available at modest costs. Thus, given that the
2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 28, NO. 5, OCT 2012

(a) Handheld designs (b) With cart (c) With backpack (d) 2nd generation model (e) Hands-free backpack mount
Fig. 2: The Zebedee handheld 3D range-sensing system. (a) CAD models of two generations of the handheld sensor hardware. (b) The first-generation handheld
device is connected to a pushcart for power and data logging. The cart also contains a spinning SICK laser used for comparison. (c) The electronics and a
lithium-ion battery can be carried in a backpack with a netbook or small computer to collect and/or process data. (d) Second-generation handheld Zebedee
model. A sheath is covering the spring for aesthetic purposes. (e) Hands-free configuration of Zebedee in which the sensor is mounted on the backpack.

passive linkage mechanism can be as simple as a spring, the
hardware cost of the proposed device is essentially the price
of a 2D laser scanner (plus, for some applications, an inertial
measurement unit).
There are two common methods of 3D range sensing in
mobile robotics that are closely related to our approach. Firstly,
lasers can be actuated in a variety of ways, typically by peri-
odic nodding [3] or continuous rotation [4, 5]. The resulting
configurations can potentially have large fields of view, but
are relatively mechanically complex. More recently, a more
complex design which controls the rotation rate to increase
the point density in an intended gaze direction has been
proposed [6]. Secondly, a mechanically simpler solution is to
rigidly attach one or more 2D lasers to a platform and rely on
motion of the platform to produce 3D data, as is done in most
commercial mobile mapping solutions [7]. Mobile mapping
systems with fixed lasers require very precise knowledge of
the vehicle trajectory, which is typically derived from high-
grade GPS/INS solutions. When such high-grade solutions
are not available—either due to their high cost or required
operation in GPS-deprived environments—a wide field of view
sensing system would be required to allow for correction
online [5]. The proposed spring system sits between the above
two configurations: it provides a mechanically simple solution
with a large field of view, but requires platform motion in
order to be maximally functional.
The mechanical simplicity, size, and weight of this sensor
design make it suitable for developing practical solutions to
a range of challenging applications, such as mapping from a
micro-UAV, or infrastructure inspection in confined spaces. A
lightweight handheld or human-wearable version of a spring-
mounted laser would be ideal for use as a localization or map-
ping tool by first responders in emergency situations. While
several handheld 3D scanners are commercially available (e.g.,
Z Corporation’s ZScanner, Leica’s T-Scan, and Mantis Vision’s
MVC-F5), they are primarily intended for object scanning
applications, often require modification to the environment,
and have limited working volume not appropriate for large-
scale mobile applications. Available structured lighting solu-
tions are limited in their sensing range, precision, and the
lighting conditions in which they can operate. For example,
the Microsoft Kinect has an effective range of a few meters,
precision of around 12 cm at 4 m range (the range resolution
behaves approximately as r2 · 0.0075 m−1 ), and fails in bright
sunlight. Stereo cameras have similar precision characteristics
and their performance is dependent on lighting conditions and
textural appearance of the environment.
The contributions of this work are in the sensor system
design, analysis of its behavior in a variety of configurations,
and demonstration of its use for indoor and outdoor mapping.
Novel enhancements enable an open-loop Simultaneous Local-
ization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm intended for actuated
lasers to be adapted for the irregular motions of the proposed
sensor design. A further contribution is in the application of the
same SLAM algorithm to globally register a 3D point cloud
and estimate a closed-loop trajectory.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In
Section II, we describe a particular implementation of the
proposed sensor system consisting of a 2D laser scanner
and an IMU mounted on one or more springs (Figures 1
and 2), and analyze a number of different configurations of
that general design. An example application of the sensor
system is presented in Section III. Here, a handheld version
the sensor is utilized for SLAM in a number of different en-
vironments. Experiments demonstrating the SLAM algorithm
for the handheld system are presented in Section IV for a
number of environments and settings, including evaluation in
a motion capture environment. A summary and discussion of
the results, limitations, lessons learned, and future directions
conclude the article in Section V.
II. Z EBEDEE : D ESIGN AND A NALYSIS
The Zebedee 3D sensor system consists of a 2D laser
scanner and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) mounted on
one or more springs (Figures 1 and 2). The laser in our
current model is a Hokuyo UTM-30LX, which is a 2D time-
of-flight laser with a 270 ◦ field of view, 30 m maximum range,
and 40 Hz scanning rate. The dimensions of the UTM-30LX
are 60×60×85 mm, and its mass is 210 g, which makes it
ideal for low weight requirements. The IMU we use is a
MicroStrain 3DM-GX2, an industrial-grade IMU that contains
triaxial MEMS gyros and accelerometers with an output rate
BOSSE et al.: ZEBEDEE: DESIGN OF A SPRING-MOUNTED 3-D RANGE SENSOR WITH APPLICATION TO MOBILE MAPPING 3

15
of 100 Hz. Due to the expected magnitude of the spring x rot
y rot
10
oscillations, the IMU is required to have a maximum rotational z rot

gain
x
5
rate of at least 600 ◦ /s, which is an available but non-standard
0
option for the 3DM-GX2. The IMU enclosure has dimensions 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

of 41×63×32 mm, and its total mass1 is 50 g. Springs with 10

lengths between 50 and 150 mm and masses between 5 and

gain
5

y
20 g are typically utilized to realize mechanical requirements.
Some fine tuning is possible by adjusting the length of the 0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

spring and/or adding mass to the the sensor head. The laser 30

and IMU are mounted within a 150 g 3D-printed housing 20

gain
(Figure 2a left), giving the system a total mass of well under

z
10

half a kilogram. 0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
We define the sensor head to be the portion of the device freq [Hz]

on the range sensor side of the passive linkage mechanism, (a) Handheld single spring
and the sensor base to be the rigid body containing the mount
60
point on the platform side of the linkage. For instance, in the x rot
y rot
40
case of Zebedee, the sensor head contains the laser and IMU, z rot

gain
x
and the sensor base may be a vehicle or handle on which the 20

spring is mounted. 0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

600

400
A. Spring Characterization

gain
y
200
When considering the suitability of a particular spring, it is
0
important to understand the behavior of the resulting device 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

400
under a range of operating conditions. In order to empirically
300
characterize the performance of a particular choice of spring,
gain

200
z

we measure the system response of the sensor head due to 100

motions of the sensor base. In particular, we analyze the 0

transfer of motions through the system using the rotational
velocity of the base as input and the rotational velocity of
the head as output. For these experiments, a second IMU is
mounted to the sensor base in order to measure its motion
while the system is excited over a range of frequencies. We
consider two spring configurations for Zebedee: a short single-
spring design for handheld applications; and a dual-spring
design for a vehicle mount. The dual-spring design restricts
the rotations so that the sensor head does not flip over with
strong accelerations. The handheld sensor (Figure 2) is excited
manually, while the dual-spring sensor is mounted on a Gator
TE electric vehicle (Figure 1b) and driven off-road to provide
inputs for system identification.
Manual excitation of the handheld unit provides roughly
10 Hz of input bandwidth. To achieve higher input bandwidths
for analysis, we could use a vibration table or mechanical
robot arm commanded on a pseudo-random trajectory, though
typical handheld motions rarely exceed frequencies of 5 Hz.
From the observed data, a 16th -order state space system
is identified using an Observer Kalman Filter Identification
technique [8]. The frequency response of the identified 3 × 3
MIMO system characterizes the resonant frequencies, amplifi-
cation gains, and cross-coupling of the input to output rotation
rates (Figure 3). In general, the springs tend to amplify the
lower frequencies while suppressing higher frequencies. For
the handheld Zebedee with a single spring, we have identified
the dominant resonant frequency for pitch and roll rates at
1.4 Hz, and a secondary peak at 6.9 Hz for yaw rates. The
1 On newer generations of Zebedee hardware, we use a MicroStrain 3DM-
GX3-25-OEM, which has a mass of 11.5 g.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
freq [Hz]
(b) Vehicle dual spring
Fig. 3: Frequency responses of the springs used in two different configurations
of Zebedee. The inputs are expressed in the sensor base frame, and the
responses in the sensor head frame. The sensor head origin is located at
the laser origin with x forward and z up. When the spring is in its neutral
position, the orientations of the base and head frames are roughly aligned.
The reported values are gains on rotational velocity vector components (not
roll, pitch, yaw rates).
vehicle-mounted Zebedee with dual springs has three different
resonant frequencies at 1.6 Hz for the pitch rates, 2.25 Hz for
yaw rates and 5.4 Hz for roll rates. The 5.4 Hz roll resonance
is a residual vibration (note the relative magnitude of the gain)
which does not contribute significantly to the sensor sweeping
motion. The gains are about an order of magnitude greater than
the handheld system, which is a result of the longer springs and
is necessary to amplify the smaller input rotations present on
a vehicle. The observed resonant frequency values are similar
to actuation frequencies commonly used for nodding and
spinning laser systems. Typical amplitudes of the oscillations
result in a spread of approximately 100 ◦ for the handheld
sensor and 70 ◦ for the vehicle mounted sensor, which provides
a more than adequate field of view for many 3D perception
applications.
Simple heuristic adjustments can be use to fine-tune the
behavior of a particular configuration. For example, lengthen-
ing the spring—or more precisely, increasing the distance of
the sensor head center of gravity with respect to the sensor
base—decreases the resonant frequencies. Adding mass to the
sensor head or decreasing the spring constant (e.g., increasing
the pitch or decreasing the wire diameter) increases the gain.
4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 28, NO. 5, OCT 2012

(a) -5 ms latency error (b) -2 ms latency error (c) 0 ms latency error (d) 2 ms latency error (e) 5 ms latency error

(f) 0 ms added noise (g) 1 ms added noise (h) 2 ms added noise (i) 5 ms added noise (j) 10 ms added noise
Fig. 4: A comparison of mapping results assuming timing errors between the laser and IMU. The map shows a section of an indoor environment viewed along
a vertical cross-section. The points are colored by rotational velocity, thus differentiating points generated from sensing passes in opposite directions of the
spring oscillations. The misalignments visible for the non-zero latency errors illustrate the sensitivity of Zebedee to millisecond-scale timing errors. First row:
latency errors in the range of -5 ms to 5 ms between the laser sensor and the IMU are added to the baseline timing estimate. This type of error commonly
occurs due to differences in sensor clock offsets, and can be dynamically corrected for (see Section III-C). Second row: Gaussian noise with standard deviation
up to 10 ms is added to the baseline timing estimate. This type of error can occur due to timing noise, clock resolution, and variable data buffering due to
CPU or communications load, and can be challenging to filter in general due to the variety of error sources.

B. Timing Based on these observations, we conclude that for most

Timing accuracy, synchronization, and calibration has been
recognized as a key factor in precision mapping and perception
systems [9, 10]. The two main sensors comprising Zebedee
are by default not synchronized, and due to timing jitter and
non-constant latencies, the timestamps of the data arriving
from the sensors cannot be naı̈vely accepted as accurate. The
error in the projected position of a laser point is proportional
to the rotational velocity, its range, and the timing latency
error. Typical use of Zebedee induces rotational rates of
around 600 ◦ /s, which implies that at a range of 10 m every
millisecond of error in latency would result in approximately
10 cm of error in the laser point position. The sources of the
timing errors include variable data buffering and/or dropped
scans due to high system loads; motor speed adjustments
internal to the Hokuyo laser; resolution of the system2 and
Hokuyo clock (1 ms); temperature; and, to a lesser extent,
gyroscopic effects on the rotating mirror in the laser when
shaken vigorously.
As an example of the importance of timing accuracy,
Figure 4 shows two series of point clouds from a mapping
application. The first row shows the effect of errors due to
the timing offset between the laser and IMU. The center
point cloud uses an estimated timing correction calculated
by the mapping solution, and to either side the point clouds
have had extra latency errors applied to this correction. With
the introduction of latency errors, the relative positions of
surfaces measured at different sensor head rotational velocities
are misaligned, even though the local surface structure is
maintained. The second row of the figure shows the effects of
increasing the timing jitter. Unlike the latency errors, timing
jitter results in unrecoverable blurring of the local structure
that increases with magnitude of the sensor head rotational
velocity.
2 Older versions of the Linux OS exhibited up to 4 ms timing quantization
when processing USB data, but this appears to have improved greatly with
recent releases.
applications, some means of time synchronization and smooth-
ing must be built into the solution. Much of the timing jitter
effects can be smoothed with knowledge of both the sensor
internal and host system clock; however, timing latencies are
not observable from the time sequences alone. We address
the issue of latency estimation in our SLAM solution in
Section III-C.
III. 3D SLAM WITH Z EBEDEE
A simple, lightweight, 3D range sensor such as Zebedee is
ideal for many mapping and localization applications. Useful
accelerations, vibrations, and oscillations are naturally present
in small rotary wing UAVs, off-road wheeled vehicles, and all-
terrain legged robots, such as RHex [11] and LittleDog [12]. A
handheld or wearable sensor performing SLAM could also be
useful in first responder applications, indoor mapping [13, 14],
and inspection of infrastructure or natural environment within
confined spaces. We have developed an online SLAM solution
in which we are able to accurately estimate the six degree
of freedom (6DoF) motion of the sensor head and generate
a 3D point cloud as Zebedee is transported through the
environment. While we can apply this approach to produce
globally registered trajectories and maps, we first focus on an
open-loop incremental solution analogous to scan-matching.
The Zebedee SLAM algorithm is adapted from an algorithm
previously developed for a continuously spinning 2D laser on
a moving platform [5]. Similar to the case of a spinning laser,
over the typical time it takes for Zebedee to sweep over the
scene, significant platform motion may occur and the resulting
3D scan cannot be treated as a rigid snapshot from a single
location. However, the irregular and nondeterministic motion
of Zebedee—in contrast with the controlled and repetitive
nature of a spinning laser—introduces some significant new
challenges into this SLAM problem.
At a high level, the SLAM algorithm estimates the 6DoF
trajectory T (τ ) consisting of a sequence of translations t(τ )
BOSSE et al.: ZEBEDEE: DESIGN OF A SPRING-MOUNTED 3-D RANGE SENSOR WITH APPLICATION TO MOBILE MAPPING
and rotations3 r(τ ) of the 2D sensor frame relative to the
world frame as a function of time (τ ). For this view-based
SLAM formulation, the trajectory is sufficient to describe the
full state and is used to project the raw laser measurements
into a registered 3D point cloud when necessary. As new
data are acquired, the algorithm proceeds by processing a
time-windowed segment of the trajectory, then advancing the
window by a fraction of its length from the previous time
step. Each segment is processed by solving a linearized system
to determine the smooth trajectory that best explains corre-
sponding surfaces in the associated 3D point cloud, subject to
boundary conditions that ensure continuity with the previous
segment.
The processing of a segment of data is an iterative pro-
cess following a similar framework to the well-established
Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm commonly used for
point cloud registration. A key difference of this approach
from the standard ICP formulation is that instead of solving
for a single rigid transformation, the solution estimates a
continuous trajectory. Similar to ICP, there are two main
processing steps that are iterated until convergence. The first
step identifies corresponding surface patches from the laser
point cloud, and the second step updates the trajectory to
minimize errors between matching surfaces and deviations
from the measured IMU accelerations and rotational velocities.
The optimized state also includes parameters for estimating
time synchronization and IMU biases, which may change
slowly over time.
On the first iteration, the previously unprocessed trajectory
segment is initialized by integrating the accelerometer and
gyro measurements from the IMU. Since the processing win-
dow is advanced by a fraction of its length, the first section of
the trajectory segment will have already been estimated from
the previous time step, thus the IMU data are only required
to propagate the trajectory for the remainder of the window.
A. Correspondence Step
Surface elements, or surfels, are extracted from the 3D
point cloud projected from the initial trajectory estimate.
Clusters of laser points that are both spatially and temporally
proximal are identified and used to compute surface properties
based on the centralized second-order moment matrix of the
point coordinates. Provided there are enough points in the
cluster, the surface normal is obtained from the eigenvector
corresponding to the minimum eigenvalue of the second-order
moment matrix. An estimate of the surface planarity, computed
from the ratio of the eigenvalues, is used to discard surfels that
are not approximately planar since the estimate of their surface
normals would be unreliable. The timestamp associated with
the surfel is computed from the mean of the timestamps of
all the points in the cluster. Clusters with a small (less than
∼ 15 ◦ /s) rotational velocity component normal to the scan
3 We use various representations of 3D rotations (quaternion, axis-angle,
rotation matrix) in our implementation as appropriate. Quaternions are used for
storage and interpolations; axis-angle is used for linearizations; and rotation
matrices are used when projecting laser points (roll-pitch-yaw values are only
ever used for user input/output). Unless otherwise specified, r indicates an
abstract rotation entity.
5
plane are discarded since the unknown translational velocities
dominate the perceived local shape. When the normal com-
ponent of the rotational velocity is high, then the initially
unknown translational effect on the local surface geometry
is minimized. However, for very fast motions, the surfels are
automatically discarded due to undersampling (i.e., too few
points per cluster).
The laser point clusters are determined by spatially decom-
posing the scene into a multi-resolutional voxel grid (similar
to the strategy used in our previous work [5]). The temporally
proximal points contained within each cube-shaped cell define
each cluster from which a surfel is generated. There may be
multiple clusters of points within the same spatial cell if the
point timestamps span an interval larger than a predetermined
threshold. The voxel resolutions are selected to double at each
level, thus the cluster surface properties at coarser resolutions
can be computed recursively from the finer resolutions. In
order to reduce the sensitivity of the segmentation to the cell
boundaries, the surfels at each level are computed from two
grids offset by half of a cell width4 .
Corresponding surfels are obtained from approximate k-
nearest neighbor queries of a kd-tree in the six-dimensional
space of surfel positions and normals. Matches are filtered by
retaining only reciprocal surfel matches (i.e., the two matched
surfels are both identified as near neighbors of one another).
In contrast to our previous work [5], correspondences can
arise from any two surfels provided the difference between
their timestamps is larger than half of the nominal sweep
period. These conditions help focus computational resources
on quality matches over a larger time span, which provides
more useful constraints to the trajectory. Each matched pair
generates a match error to be minimized in the optimization
step, which follows the correspondence step. Correspondences
are recomputed in each iteration of the optimization procedure.
B. Optimization Step
The optimization step minimizes the surface correspondence
error and IMU measurement deviations by adjusting the cur-
rent estimate of the trajectory. As the underlying problem
is continuous, we model the state x as a vector of stacked
trajectory corrections δT (τs ) ≡ [δr(τs ), δt(τs )]T sampled at
regular intervals τs , and interpolated for the times in between.
The 6DoF trajectory corrections are applied to the current
trajectory estimate in the following manner:
Tcorrected = T ⊕ δT ⊕ Tr (1)
t 
δr ⊕ r
≡ (2)
δt + t
where Tt ⊕ Tr = T such that Tt consists only of the three
translational degrees of freedom, and Tr the three rotational
degrees of freedom, of T (the time notation has been omitted
for clarity). This non-standard formulation is preferable since
the corrections are expressed in the global frame and has
one less term than the standard formulation δT ⊕ T ≡
4 The offset grids approximate a body-centered cubic tessellation with cubic
cells instead of octahedra.
6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 28, NO. 5, OCT 2012
[δr ⊕ r, δt + δr ⊕ t]T . The δr ⊕ t term is problematic for
large t once the system is linearized (see below).
There are three types of terms considered in the minimiza-
tion: surfel match errors, IMU measurement deviations, and
initial condition constraints.
Surfel match errors guide the trajectory to minimize the
distances between surfel correspondences along a common
surface normal. For a correspondence between surfels i and j,
the match error, expressed in the global frame, is:
eij = ξij nTij (µi (δT (τi )) − µj (δT (τj ))) (3)
where the common surface normal nij is the eigenvector
corresponding to the minimum eigenvalue λ1 of the sum of the
matched surfels’ moment matrices, and µi is the centroid of
surfel i (which depends on
p the trajectory correction at time τi ).
The coefficient ξij = 1/ σr2 + λ1 is dependent on the sensor
measurement noise σr and the surfel thickness, captured by
the eigenvalue λ1 .
Minimizing the IMU measurement deviations ensures that
the estimated trajectory is smooth and matches the observed
rotational velocities, translational accelerations, and gravity
direction.
d2 t(τ )
 
ea (τ ) = Σ−1/2
a r(τ ) ⊕ a(τ ) − − g (4)
dτ 2
 
dr(τ )
eω (τ ) = Σ−1/2ω ω(τ ) − (5)
dτ
where a is the measured acceleration vector, ω is the measured
rotational velocity vector, ea (τ ) is expressed in the global
frame, eω (τ ) is expressed in the IMU frame, Σa and Σω are
the IMU measurement covariances, and g is the acceleration
due to gravity.
The initial condition constraints enforce continuity with the
previous trajectory segment by penalizing any changes to the
first three trajectory correction samples in the current segment.
The above error terms are nonlinear with respect to the rota-
tional corrections. Therefore, we linearize the errors about the
current best estimate by taking a first-order Taylor expansion,
and solve a linear system Ax = b, where x is the stacked
vector of trajectory corrections. Each error term forms a row
of the system matrix A according to its Jacobian with respect
to x. For purposes of computing the Jacobian, we assume
that the trajectory corrections are linearly interpolated in time
between the trajectory samples. The vector b is a vector of
errors evaluated at the linearization point.
To mitigate the effect of correspondence errors (including
inconsistent matches from dynamic objects), the linear system
is solved by iterative reweighted least squares where the
weights wi are computed within an M-estimator framework
according to a Lorentzian function on the residual
1
wi = (6)
1 + ((Aij x − bij )/r̄)2
where Aij and bij are the elements from the row correspond-
ing to match error eij , and r̄ is a soft outlier threshold. We have
observed that starting with a large outlier threshold which is
decreased at each iteration leads to more reliable convergence
of the optimization.
C. Timing Latency Estimation
As noted in Section II-B, the system is sensitive to
millisecond-scale timing latencies between the IMU and the
laser. Therefore, we augment the optimization state x with
an extra dimension to estimate a latency correction over the
processing window. The Jacobians of the match errors then
have an additional term for the latency that is dependent on
the velocity induced at the surfel centroids (i.e., the velocity
of the sensor transferred along the lever arm of the scan ray).
Because the rate of change of the latencies is very slow relative
to the trajectory segment window length, it is not necessary
to model higher order terms such as skew and drift.
D. IMU Bias Estimation
Another significant source of error when working with
MEMS IMUs is the bias on the raw acceleration and ro-
tational rate measurements. The 6DoF bias vector is non-
stationary and can change significantly over intervals of a
few minutes; therefore, pre-calibration is not a feasible option.
Rotational rate bias can be estimated when it is known that
the sensor is stationary; however, in our application the sensor
head is typically oscillating continuously after initialization.
Accelerometer bias is typically only observed in the direction
of gravity, which requires multiple orientations in order to
measure all the components of the bias. Nonetheless, small
updates to the bias can be maintained by including correction
states in the SLAM optimization and modeling their effect on
the IMU measurements.
E. Fixed Views
To reduce the accumulation of drift errors over processing
windows, the algorithm maintains a set of surfels from a small
number of recent past views, called fixed views, from which
match errors are also minimized. For these match errors, the
corresponding rows in the system matrix will only have terms
for the corrections at times within the processing window
(i.e., the trajectory corresponding to the fixed views is not
further corrected). A fixed view is taken to be the surfels from
the first section of an optimized processing window (which
has already been finalized), saved at predetermined distance
and angle intervals along the trajectory (i.e., as the trajectory
grows, fixed views are generated whenever the growth is larger
than either of a predefined distance or angle threshold). A
small constant number of fixed views is buffered in order to
avoid unbounded growth in computation from generating and
processing the additional surfel match error terms.
F. Global Registration
The Zebedee SLAM algorithm can also be applied to
globally register a point cloud given an initial guess for the
trajectory (such as the open-loop solution described above), to
produce a closed-loop trajectory. Rather than processing the
trajectory in small increments, the global registration algorithm
operates on the entire trajectory in one large window. The
algorithm similarly generates surfels from the point cloud
BOSSE et al.: ZEBEDEE: DESIGN OF A SPRING-MOUNTED 3-D RANGE SENSOR WITH APPLICATION TO MOBILE MAPPING 7

(a) Office environment (b) Courtyard environment (c) Tall grass environment

(d) Office trajectory (e) Courtyard trajectory (f) Tall grass trajectory
Fig. 5: Photos and open-loop results from three of the test environments. The trajectories are intended to follow a box shape, which were traced out by hand
while shaking Zebedee.

data, identifies correspondences, then solves a nonlinear sys-
tem minimizing match errors, deviations from the open-loop
velocities, and deviations from gravity. During the global
optimization, the timing latency and IMU biases are not
further refined from the estimates computed from the open-
loop solution. A limitation of the global registration algorithm
is that it requires a good initial guess: if the open-loop solution
drifts excessively, the optimization will not converge to the
correct alignment, and a coarse registration or loop-closure
identification step (e.g., place recognition-based) would be
required first to improve the initial trajectory.
IV. E XPERIMENTS
We evaluate the quality of the Zebedee SLAM solution
by considering both the map and trajectory accuracies. For
the first series of experiments, we do not have ground truth
for the irregular trajectory of the sensor head. Therefore, we
instead use a more conventional sensor on a wheeled pushcart
that closely follows the position of the Zebedee sensor base
(Figure 2b). A spinning SICK LMS291, which rotates the laser
at 1 Hz about its middle scan ray, is mounted on the pushcart
at a height of 750 mm. The spinning laser produces 13,500
3D points per second in a hemispherical field of view with its
center oriented horizontally behind the cart.
The cart is pulled along a trajectory while a person holding
and shaking Zebedee follows. As this was an early prototype
of Zebedee, the sensor was tethered to the cart for power and
data logging purposes—this also implies that the path followed
by Zebedee was constrained to be within about a meter of the
cart trajectory at all times. In newer versions of Zebedee the
battery and logging computer are stored in a backpack. We are
able to estimate the trajectory of the spinning laser accurately
using an algorithm similar to the original approach upon
which the Zebedee SLAM algorithm is based [5]. The global
registration algorithm can correct the open-loop cart trajectory
for long-term drift and close loops. Since the cart and Zebedee
trajectories are not rigidly connected, quantitative metrics for
evaluating the Zebedee solution analyze the error between the
point clouds rather than the trajectories. Measurements from
a Vicon motion capture system (Section IV-C) allow us to
evaluate the trajectory accuracy under controlled settings.
It should be noted that when controlled manually, the sensor
head oscillation is typically dominated by pitching motion,
though some rolling motion still occurs naturally (or is some-
times induced by the operator). Other sensor head motions,
such as a lasso-like rotational motion, are also acceptable and
handled by the algorithm without modifications.
A. Pseudostationary Experiments
To demonstrate the local quality of the solution, we compare
the point clouds generated by Zebedee and the spinning laser
while keeping the cart stationary in a variety of environments.
We refer to the spinning laser trajectory and point cloud as
the reference trajectory and reference point cloud respectively.
Zebedee is waved by hand and moved twice around a hori-
zontal box pattern within arm’s reach within approximately
1 m of, and oriented in the same general direction as, the
spinning laser. Point clouds are generated using the data from
each sensor. The open-loop Zebedee SLAM algorithm (with
no fixed views) is applied to the handheld sensor data. Since
the cart does not undergo any motion, the raw points can
be used directly to generate the reference point cloud. The
8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 28, NO. 5, OCT 2012

two point clouds are then globally registered to one another

using an iterative optimization procedure that minimizes the
error between surfels extracted from the Zebedee points and
the reference point cloud. We can then evaluate the local
accuracy of the Zebedee point clouds by analyzing the error
statistics of each point compared to the closest surfel from
the reference cloud and visualizing the magnitude of errors
in different environments. The surfels in the reference cloud
are generated using a pair of single-level Cartesian voxel grids
with resolution of 35 cm offset by half a cell width in each
dimension. Since the surface normals are oriented to face away
from the sensor, negative errors indicate a Zebedee point being
too close to the sensor.
We performed the pseudostationary tests in an office envi- (a) Pseudostationary – open-loop
ronment with cluttered desks and an offset ceiling (Figure 5a);
on an outdoor courtyard with many trees and a non-planar
ground (Figure 5b); in an outdoor field with meter tall, bushy
grass (Figure 5c); in a long, featureless hallway; in an outdoor
road sided by bushes and trees; and in a stairwell (for brevity,
photos of the last three environments are not included).
Figure 5 shows overhead views of the estimated trajectories
from a sample of the environments. The trajectories follow
a box-like pattern, as expected from the input motion. The
trajectories estimated for the other three datasets (not pic-
tured) similarly match the intended box pattern. The match
error distributions for all six environments are illustrated in
Figure 6a. The differences between the Zebedee point cloud
and the reference point cloud is greatest in the “tall grass”
environment, which is mainly due to variation between the
performance of the SICK and Hokuyo lasers: the Hokuyo (b) Mobile – closed-loop
laser tends to penetrate deeper through the grass, resulting Fig. 6: Zebedee point cloud error distributions relative to the reference
in differences between the point clouds. Despite the wider point clouds. Standard deviations are listed for each dataset. (a) Match
error distributions for the pseudostationary experiments. (b) Match error
error distribution, Zebedee performs well in this environment distributions for the mobile mapping experiments.
as evidenced by the correct trajectory shape (Figure 5f) and
the appearance of the resulting point cloud (not pictured).
We observe the highest accuracy (2 –2.5 cm standard deviation researchers for the Hokuyo URG-04 [15].
of the match errors) in indoor environments containing more
predominant large planar surfaces (“hallway” and “stairwell”),
whose error distributions tend to have taller peaks (the “office” B. Mobile Mapping Experiments
environment, while indoors, was more cluttered and therefore For the mobile experiments, we pull the cart closely fol-
less dominated by planes as compared to the other indoor lowed by a handheld Zebedee (which is tethered to the cart)
scenes). The remainder of the datasets have similar error through a loop in an indoor office and an outdoor courtyard.
distributions with standard deviations around 5 cm. Note that The open-plan office environment is crowded with cluttered
since our analysis relies on planar surfaces fit to the point desks and other furniture (Figure 5a), while the outdoor
clouds, a lack of strong surfaces in the environment may courtyard has tall vegetation in the center, building walls on
produce less reliable results (as has occurred in the “tall grass” three sides, and a staircase (Figure 5b). In each environment,
environment). the looped path is traversed twice. The spinning laser measure-
The reported range accuracy in the laser manufacturer’s ments are processed to estimate a globally registered reference
specification is between 3 and 5 cm, which is in agreement trajectory and point cloud, as described above.
with the minimum standard deviation of errors among the The Zebedee measurements are first processed to compute
environments tested. In general, we observe a slight bias an open-loop trajectory using the incremental online SLAM
of about 1 –2 cm in the errors towards the sensor, which is algorithm, which then provides the initial estimate for the
likely due to bias in the laser range readings. The scale of closed-loop trajectory optimization. Though the solution is
this observed bias agrees with the laser manufacturer’s range processed offline after data collection, the open-loop trajectory
calibration data (shipped with each sensor); however, this is computed faster than real-time on a 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon
information is only supplied as coarse samples (primarily at CPU. The software is currently implemented in Matlab, with
5 m intervals) and the deviations are nonlinear. A negative bias some of the computationally intensive operations coded in
of a few centimeters in range has also been reported by other C++ with a MEX interface. When running with zero fixed
BOSSE et al.: ZEBEDEE: DESIGN OF A SPRING-MOUNTED 3-D RANGE SENSOR WITH APPLICATION TO MOBILE MAPPING 9

(a) Trajectories (overhead view) (b) Closed-loop Zebedee point cloud colored by error

(c) Trajectories (oblique view) (d) Closed-loop Zebedee point cloud colored by height
Fig. 7: SLAM results from the indoor office environment. (a) and (c) The trajectories estimated from Zebedee (both open-loop and closed) and the spinning
laser (closed-loop). Note the coils in the Zebedee trajectories due to the oscillations of the sensor head. The Zebedee trajectories appear at a greater height as
the device was held at a level higher than the spinning laser origin. (b) An overhead view of the point cloud generated from the closed-loop Zebedee SLAM
solution with the trajectory overlaid. The points and trajectory are colored by error relative to the reference point cloud. The points from the floor and ceiling
have been removed for clarity. (d) An oblique view of the point cloud colored by height (the ceiling points have been removed for clarity).

views, the online SLAM algorithm processes the data in
approximately 62% of the acquisition time, while for two and
five fixed views computation requires 71% and 73% of the
acquisition time respectively. The processing time of the global
optimization depends on the number of reobserved surfaces,
which in turn depends on the nature of the environment and the
trajectory followed. For the office environment (3.5 minutes
acquisition time) the global optimization runs in under one
minute, while in the outdoor courtyard (6.5 minutes acquisition
time) it runs in under two minutes. Therefore, for both of these
datasets, a closed-loop solution can be obtained from the raw
data in less than the data acquisition time.
The closed-loop trajectory is used to project all the Zebedee
points into a common frame and the resulting point cloud
is compared with the reference point cloud in the same
manner as in the pseudostationary experiments above. For the
global registration, surfels are generated using multi-resolution
Cartesian voxel grids at resolutions of 0.5 , 1 , 2 , and 4 m
(including a half-resolution offset grid at each resolution).
The trajectories from the indoor office environment are
shown in Figures 7a and 7c. We note that both the open-
loop and closed-loop Zebedee trajectories closely follow the
spinning laser cart trajectory. The point cloud generated from
Zebedee in this experiment is displayed colorized by its errors
relative to the reference point cloud in Figure 7b. Though the
slight inward bias is noticeable, the map is locally consistent
and is a good quality representation of the office environment
(Figure 7d).
Figure 8 illustrates the trajectories and point cloud from the
outdoor courtyard environment. Despite the reduction in the
prevalence of planar structure, the Zebedee trajectory closely
follows the spinning laser trajectory, and the point cloud is
a locally consistent and good quality representation of the
courtyard environment.
The growth rate of the open-loop trajectory errors for the
outdoor courtyard environment can be seen in Figure 9. From
repeating this experiment several times, we have observed that
the envelope of the open-loop trajectory drifts between about
15 –25 cm/min positionally from the closed-loop solution, and
about 0.4 –1.5 ◦ /min in yaw. This observed open-loop angular
drift is considerably smaller than the measured IMU error
rates.
The distributions of the point cloud errors for both environ-
ments are depicted in Figure 6b, and are commensurate with
the sensor noise. The indoor errors are slightly lower (standard
deviation of 3.9 cm) and less biased than the outdoor errors
(standard deviation of 4.1 cm), likely due to the reduced struc-
ture in the outdoor environment. The modeling error inherent
to the point cloud comparison metric tends to broaden the
error distribution in the presence of non-planar surfaces (such
as foliage), resulting in an overestimate of the magnitude of
the registration errors. Other possible sources of error include
the range calibration of the Hokuyo, the beam divergence of
the lasers, calibration errors in the spinning SICK (both range
10 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 28, NO. 5, OCT 2012

(a) Trajectories (overhead view) (b) Closed-loop Zebedee point cloud colored by error

(c) Trajectories (oblique view) (d) Closed-loop Zebedee point cloud colored by height
Fig. 8: SLAM results from the outdoor courtyard environment. (a) and (c) The trajectories estimated from Zebedee (both open-loop and closed) and the
spinning laser (closed-loop). The Zebedee trajectories appear at a greater height as the device was held at a level higher than the spinning laser origin. (b) An
overhead view of the point cloud generated from the closed-loop Zebedee SLAM solution with the trajectory overlaid. The points and trajectory are colored
by error relative to the reference point cloud. The points from the ground and some of the tree canopy have been removed for clarity. (d) An oblique view of
the point cloud colored by height. Present in the scene are various leafy and palm trees, a staircase, and building structure along three sides of the perimeter.

calibration and spinning mount calibration), and differences
in performance of the two lasers on surfaces such as glass or
vegetation.
Timing latency corrections between the Hokuyo laser and
MicroStrain IMU clocks for all of the datasets described in this
article are shown in Figure 10. We observe that the required
correction must sometimes account for drift on the order of
one millisecond per minute, which would have significant
consequences (see Figure 4) if not properly addressed. In the
longer sequences, additional timing information was recorded
from the internal clock of the Hokuyo laser. The availability
of this timing information enables better initial smoothing of
the timing signal, and as a result the latency corrections do
not vary as quickly (but can vary within a range well beyond
a few milliseconds in longer datasets due to clock skew and
drift). In practice, there are various strategies for dealing with
the initialization of the timing latency (rather than initializing
it to be zero). If the dataset is being processed offline, it can
be restarted near the value at which it first settles. If the data
is being processed online, the latency can be initialized with
the last known estimate.
C. Motion Capture Experiments
Quantitative analysis can be performed on the trajectory
provided a ground truth trajectory estimate is available. We
therefore evaluate the accuracy of the trajectory in a motion
capture environment in which we can track the position of
the Zebedee sensor head with high precision. A Vicon system
consisting of 14 cameras is capable of tracking the positions
of tags containing multiple reflective targets to millimeter-
BOSSE et al.: ZEBEDEE: DESIGN OF A SPRING-MOUNTED 3-D RANGE SENSOR WITH APPLICATION TO MOBILE MAPPING
(a) Position errors
(b) Angle errors
Fig. 9: Errors of the outdoor open-loop trajectory compared to the closed-
loop trajectory. The two trajectories are aligned at their initial position and
heading. Roll and pitch angles are not adjusted in this alignment since they
are referenced from gravity.
Fig. 10: Latency corrections between the laser and IMU estimated by the
SLAM algorithm over time for all datasets.
precision within a region of approximately 2 m by 2 m. The
precision on the tag orientation is approximately 1◦ , mainly
due to the small size of the tags. The environment containing
the Vicon system is a 10 × 8 m room that includes a 6.5 × 4
× 3 m support frame in the center of the room, with computer
workstations, furniture, as well as other infrastructure and
office clutter around the periphery.
A reflective tag is mounted to the top of the Zebedee sensor
head to provide 6DoF tracking as it is oscillated by hand and
carried through the motion capture region (Figure 2c). While
we performed multiple experiments, for the particular run de-
tailed here the sensor body follows an irregular path containing
multiple loops and figure-eights with the sensor held at varying
heights (Figure 11). We process the Zebedee data three times
using zero, two, or five fixed views (Section III-E) at spacings
of min(0.5 m, 120 ◦ ) along the trajectory, in order to evaluate
their effect on the solution. Due to the limited precision in
the Vicon-reported tag orientation estimates, we could only
perform meaningful analysis for the positional errors of the
trajectory. However, we can report that the Zebedee-computed
11
orientations are within the limits of the Vicon system.
Fig. 11: Overhead view of the trajectory of the sensor during the motion
capture experiment. The height of the sensor is varied over the course of the
trajectory. Shown are the position of the Zebedee handle and sensor head
according to the Vicon system, as well as an estimate of the handle position
estimated based on the SLAM trajectory estimate by assuming the spring is a
rigid link. The offset between the Vicon and SLAM handle estimates are due
to the tag being attached to the edge of the handle, rather than the center.
Time-series of the trajectory errors are plotted in Fig-
ure 12, while distributions of these errors are presented in
Figure 13. As expected, for the open-loop trajectories, we
observe a growth in positional error over time (Figure 12a),
while for the closed-loop trajectories the error is relatively
constant (Figure 12b). An increase in the number of fixed
views reduces the magnitude of the drift in the open-loop
solution (Figure 13a), from about 5–10 cm/min with no fixed
views, to about 1.5 cm/min with two fixed views, and about
0.5 cm/min with five fixed views. The closed-loop solutions
closely match the ground truth trajectory (Figure 13b), as
can be quantified by the measured RMS errors: 0.88 cm with
zero fixed views, with little difference between two and five
fixed views (0.72 cm and 0.69 cm RMS error respectively).
Including more fixed views generally improves the solution
with diminishing returns, and in most cases we find that
using two fixed views is sufficient for maintaining global
accuracy. Some high frequency variation is observed in the
translational error measurement, which we believe is likely due
to imperfect calibration between the laser and IMU frames.
Further improvements to our calibration methodology are
planned to reduce this effect. Overall, the results appear to
be consistent with the point cloud errors reported above in the
pseudostationary and mobile mapping experiments (Figure 6),
taking into account the inherent range accuracy and bias of
the lasers.
D. Dependence on Operator Control
Clearly, the field of view of the handheld Zebedee system
is dependent on the motion and control of the operator. A
valid question is then: how robust is the system to poor
instantaneous oscillatory motion, and how dependent is its per-
formance on the operator’s skill? To investigate this question,
we conducted a set of experiments in which the sensor head
oscillatory motion is intentionally stopped for several seconds
at a time, to simulate operator “error”. In our experience,
12
(a) Open-loop error
(b) Closed-loop error
Fig. 12: Positional errors of the sensor head with reference to the ground truth
result reported by the Vicon system. Results using zero, two, and five fixed
views in the open-loop solution are reported in each case. (a) The growth of
error over time for the open-loop Zebedee solution. Drift rates in position are
observed to be approximately 7.5 cm/min, 1.5 cm/min, and 0.5 cm/min for the
zero, two, and five fixed view solutions respectively for this dataset. (b) The
error for the closed-loop trajectories after globally registering the Zebedee
data. The RMS errors are 0.88 cm, 0.72 cm, and 0.69 cm for the zero, two,
and five fixed view solutions respectively.
(a) Open-loop error
(b) Closed-loop error
Fig. 13: Distributions of the positional errors of the sensor head relative to
the Vicon ground truth estimate. Results using zero, two, and five fixed views
in the open-loop solution are reported in each case.
such gaps occasionally (but rarely) occur in rugged terrain
where the operator may have difficulty maintaining sensor
head oscillation when concentrating on balance and footing; or
in more benign environments when an inexperienced operator
must temporarily slow down; for example, to open a door.
The first dataset presented for this evaluation was collected
in a stairwell between the first and third floors of an office
building (Figure 16b). The operator started at the first floor
landing, ascended the stairs to the third floor, then returned
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 28, NO. 5, OCT 2012
Fig. 14: Sensor motion measurements collected while ascending and descend-
ing a three-story staircase. The roll and pitch of the sensor head are plotted
together with the translational velocity of the sensor base (Zebedee handle). At
seven intervals during the experiment, the sensor head rotation was effectively
stopped for several seconds while the sensor body continued to translate as the
operator walked through the environment. Two such instances are illustrated
in greater detail in the insets.
to the bottom. At several points during the data collection,
the operator intentionally prevented the sensor head from
oscillating while continuing to traverse the stairs or landings
between staircases. Each stoppage lasted for five to ten stairs,
or several strides on a landing (including yaw rotations), and
generally covered three- to six-second time intervals.
For this experiment, the second-generation version of
Zebedee was utilized (Figure 2d). The main technical differ-
ences from the original Zebedee are the use of a MicroStrain
3DM-GX3 IMU (rather than a 3DM-GX2) which is mounted
on the back of the laser (rather than the bottom), as well as a
spring with slightly different physical characteristics.
Figure 14 illustrates the general sensor head and operator
motion over the course of the experiment: the IMU roll and
pitch data indicates when the sensor is oscillating, and the
sensor base translational velocity indicates how quickly the
operator is walking. During the oscillation stoppages, the
sensor head pitch and roll are close to zero, while the sensor
base (operator) translational speed remains significant.
We expect that the use of fixed views should increase
the robustness of the algorithm to momentary sensor head
oscillation stoppages since they maintain a longer history of
valid 3D surfels to match against. Open-loop trajectories are
therefore estimated with and without fixed views for this
dataset and illustrated in Figure 15 together with a closed-
loop reference trajectory (generated using five fixed views).
We observe a significant vertical error (about 5 m) near the
beginning of the open-loop trajectory in the case with no
fixed views. The instance where this error occurred involved
a relatively long break (approximately six seconds) where the
operator walked up ten stairs with the sensor head oscillations
effectively stopped (the first circled region in Figure 14). We
also note an error in yaw appearing towards the end of the
zero-fixed view trajectory; though in general the solution is
locally consistent aside from the large vertical error event.
The results demonstrate that the addition of fixed views
greatly improves robustness of the algorithm: the two-fixed-
view open-loop trajectory does not contain any major errors
and drifts minimally from the reference trajectory. The open-
BOSSE et al.: ZEBEDEE: DESIGN OF A SPRING-MOUNTED 3-D RANGE SENSOR WITH APPLICATION TO MOBILE MAPPING 13

loop trajectory is close enough to the true solution that the

registration algorithm is able to produce a globally consistent
closed-loop trajectory that is similar to the reference trajectory.
The positional RMS error of the two-fixed-view closed-loop
trajectory relative to the reference trajectory is 1.7 cm. We have
further analyzed the performance of the algorithm in the pres-
ence of anomalies in both the outdoor courtyard and stairway
environments. Large error events, such as the one seen in the
zero-fixed-view stairway example, were particularly rare, and
only occurred under extreme conditions of sensor head motion
stoppage. We do not observe any noticeable negative effects
on open-loop error when moderate sensor head oscillation
stoppages occur or if a few moving pedestrians are present
in the scene. (a) Open-loop point cloud (b) Closed-loop point cloud
We further consider removing the operator’s ability to man- Fig. 16: Side views of point clouds acquired with Zebedee mounted on the
ually control the sensor head oscillations by fixing the sensor backpack (not handheld). (a) The open-loop point cloud colored by time (blue
base directly to the backpack with the center of the sensor to red), with the trajectory indicated in black. (b) The closed-loop trajectory
obtained after global registration colored by height.
field of view facing behind the operator (Figure 2e). Here, the
natural accelerations from walking are the only inputs to the
sensor motion. The primary drawback to mounting the sensor
in this way is the loss of the operator’s ability to fully control
the sensor field of view if complete coverage of all surfaces
in a complex environment is desired. However, the benefit of
having both hands available is critical in some applications
such as first response. We collected a dataset in the stairwell,
following a similar path to the previous experiment, and
observe that there is sufficient sensor head motion to reliably (a) Position errors
and accurately estimate the trajectory. The drift accumulated
from the open-loop trajectory (using two fixed views) is
illustrated in Figure 17, with the most significant components
in height (approximately 10 cm/min) and yaw (approximately
2 ◦ /min). These errors are similar to those that have been
observed in the handheld experiments and well within the
limits of the global registration convergence region. The drift
can also be visualized by comparing the open-loop and closed-
loop point clouds (Figure 16). We have tested the backpack- (b) Angle errors
mounted configuration in other environments, both indoors Fig. 17: Time series errors of the open-loop trajectory compared to the closed-
and outdoors, with similar results. Therefore, we conclude loop trajectory in the hands-free Zebedee stairwell experiment.

that a hands-free Zebedee configuration (e.g., mounted on a

backpack, shoulder, or helmet) is a viable option for deploying
the sensor on a human operator. In contrast to the backpack
mapping system proposed by Chen et al. [14], the Zebedee
design is lighter and simpler (one lidar as opposed to three),
requiring less cost and calibration, and the Zebedee system is
capable of SLAM in arbitrary environments (as opposed to
being restricted to highly planar indoor environments).

V. C ONCLUSIONS AND D ISCUSSION

(a) Overhead view (b) Side view
Fig. 15: A comparison of the trajectories estimated for the stairway dataset
using no fixed views and two fixed views. The closed-loop trajectory obtained
with five fixed views is shown as a reference trajectory. Some of the segments
where the sensor head oscillations are stopped are visible as smooth intervals
in the trajectory.
We have introduced a novel design of a 3D range sensor
consisting of a 2D lidar scanner mounted on a flexible spring
useful for 3D perception in robotics and other mobile appli-
cations. We have demonstrated a particular realization of the
general design concept, which we call Zebedee. Analysis of
the frequency response and oscillation amplitudes of the device
hardware can be performed to determine suitable component
14
specifications for a given implementation. A specialized simul-
taneous localization and mapping algorithm has been devel-
oped that can be used both for incremental motion estimation
and global point cloud registration. In fact, the same code
base can be (and has been) used for a variety of mobile 3D
laser configurations including spinning, nodding, and trawling
2D lidars. The solution has been evaluated in a variety of
environments, both indoor and outdoor, and quantitatively
analyzed using a motion capture system for ground truth
position estimates. The results show that the localization errors
are within acceptable limits for many applications, and the
precision of the point clouds is generally commensurate to a
solution from more traditional spinning laser hardware. The
motion capture experiments demonstrated that the Zebedee
trajectory can be estimated with a sub-centimeter accuracy.
We find that for all of the experiments considered (with the
exception of the zero-fixed-view solution when demonstrating
long oscillation stoppages), the open-loop trajectories are
sufficiently accurate to initialize the closed-loop optimizations,
without the need for additional coarse registration constraints
(e.g., from place recognition). The results further demonstrate
that with the inclusion of fixed views, the SLAM algorithm
is robust to irregular operator performance including brief
stoppages in sensor head oscillations on the order of several
seconds duration. We conclude that the proposed sensor would
be a reasonable choice for applications where a relatively
inexpensive, lightweight, and mechanically simple 3D range
sensor is required. In general, the performance of a passively
actuated 3D sensor would be dependent on the quality and
mechanical properties of the range sensor employed.
The mobility of the Zebedee sensor as a handheld device
allows access to most environments accessible to humans,
including rough, natural terrain and stairways. Further to the
experiments presented here, we have deployed the system in
applications including large-scale assembly plants and indoor
spaces, as well as mapped natural environments that would
otherwise be inaccessible to standard 3D mapping systems.
For vehicle-mounted versions, the passive linkage concept can
be applied to a variety of range sensors of varying performance
and mass specifications depending on the application require-
ments. Simple mechanical modifications can also be made to
the design to limit the scanning range of the sensor when
required.
A. Limitations and Lessons Learned
There are, of course, some limitations to the system.
Common to all laser-based SLAM algorithms, there exist
pathological environments where the motion is weakly or non-
observable, such as long, smooth tunnel-like spaces, or large,
featureless, open areas. Such cases are identifiable by exam-
ining the distribution of surface normals, but extreme cases
can be difficult to recover from without additional sensors.
Environments dominated by moving objects can also challenge
the algorithm since it becomes difficult to distinguish true
outliers. In some applications, the Zebedee design requires
fairly continual excitation in order to induce motion of the
sensor head. For example, the device may not be appropriate
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, VOL. 28, NO. 5, OCT 2012
for electric ground vehicles operating with infrequent acceler-
ations on smooth terrain. However, there are many potential
excitation sources in typical applications such as rough terrain,
vibrating engines, legged platforms, wind disturbances for
air vehicles or fast-moving ground vehicles, or wave motion
for marine surface vehicles. It should also be noted that the
trajectory computed by the SLAM solution tracks the sinuous
trajectory of the sensor head: further processing would be
required to also estimate the trajectory of the platform on
which the sensor base is mounted. Since the compression of
the spring is small compared to the bending of the spring,
it behaves approximately like a rigid link with a universal
joint. Thus, a simple transformation approximates the position
of the sensor base frame relative to the sensor head. An
additional IMU can be mounted on the base platform to further
estimate the relative platform orientation using the knowledge
that the two systems are coupled. More accurate results can
potentially be obtained by observing and tracking structure
on the base platform within the local point cloud. Finally, a
limitation of the SLAM solution we present is that it does
not compute an uncertainty estimate, though ongoing work is
investigating this aspect. The primary challenge in estimating a
consistent covariance is the complexity of accurately modeling
the many sources of uncertainty, including: surface normal
directions, match sensitivity, linearization and interpolation
of constraint coefficients, fixed surfel views, sliding window
initial conditions, IMU prior modeling, IMU biases, etc.
There have been several lessons learned while developing
and testing the Zebedee device. An important observation
is that timing accuracy is critical: even millisecond errors
between the IMU and laser scanner can cause significant
distortions of the point cloud data. In early Zebedee models,
we experienced some problems with wear on the IMU USB
cable, which would eventually necessitate replacement of the
cable. Using a stronger cable solved this problem, though in
the latest version we have employed a coiled cable to further
reduce strain. Cabling passing through the spring can also have
adverse effects in terms of dampening the sensor motion, so
extra care must be taken in determining cable length, diameter,
and tension.
B. Future Work
Future work will involve further development of the sensor
design and algorithms, as well as experimentation in additional
applications. The mechanical design process would benefit
from a parameterized model of the mass-spring system relating
the input spring constant, sensor head mass, and geometry,
to the resonant gains and frequencies of the resulting motion.
Ongoing efforts are focused on extending typical helical spring
models, which tend to consider in-axis motion (compression
or tension) rather than out-of-axis motion (bending). We
continue to improve the performance of the SLAM algorithm
to increase its precision. Along these lines, we are investigating
methods for calibration of the range bias of the laser, as well
as modeling the beam divergence of the laser (which can be on
the order of 0.6 ◦ –0.8 ◦ for lasers commonly used in robotics).
We are also investigating the importance of the IMU quality to
BOSSE et al.: ZEBEDEE: DESIGN OF A SPRING-MOUNTED 3-D RANGE SENSOR WITH APPLICATION TO MOBILE MAPPING
determine how low-cost an IMU can be used while still pro-
ducing accurate results. The current SLAM software is written
in Matlab, with some components written in C++ and called
through MEX wrappers. This implementation is able to run
faster than real-time on a desktop computer; however, our goal
is to enable online operation on a lightweight laptop. A C++
version of the software is currently being developed to run the
incremental SLAM algorithm and global optimization online
and in real-time on a portable computing platform. An ongoing
area of research is investigating various scene decomposition
methods for generating surfels. While the current solution
works sufficiently well, this step is one of the computational
bottlenecks in the system. We believe that a more sophisticated
technique could result in fewer, but higher quality, surfels
enabling computational savings while still maintaining a high
degree of accuracy and robustness. Further applications we are
considering are the use of Zebedee for obstacle detection on
an off-road vehicle (e.g., using larger SICK lasers on stronger
springs) or a small rotary wing UAV, and using local point
cloud views for place recognition [16] within a larger known
map. Other implementations of the general concept may use
other range sensors or mechanical linkages, such as floating
the device in a viscous fluid, use of elastic cables, or hanging
a sensor on a rope as a pendulum.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Steven Martin, Timothy
Gurnett, and the Queensland University of Technology for use
of their equipment and assistance with the Vicon experiments.
The design of the second-generation handheld Zebedee device
(Figure 2d) was developed with assistance from CMD Product
Design and Innovation (http://cmd.net.au). A patent applica-
tion associated with the technology described in this article
has been filed by the CSIRO in 2010 [17].
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Michael Bosse received the Ph.D. degree in electical
engineering and computer science from the Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004, while
working in the Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). For his doctoral
thesis, Dr. Bosse developed the Atlas framework
for large-scale mapping. He is originally from Los
Angeles, California, USA.
Since 2006, he has been a Robotics Sensor In-
tegration Specialist and a Senior Research Scientist
with the Autonomous Systems Laboratory, ICT Cen-
tre, CSIRO in Brisbane, Australia. His research interests focus on SLAM and
real-time perception for field robotics.
Robert Zlot received the Ph.D. degree in robotics
from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, while
working in the Field Robotics Center of the Robotics
Institute. He is originally from Toronto, Canada.
He is currently a Senior Research Scientist with
the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at CSIRO in
Brisbane, Australia. His current research interests
are in perception for field robotics and mobile map-
ping.
Paul Flick received the Bachelor of Engineering de-
gree in mechatronic engineering from the University
of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia in
2000. Paul is originally from Byron Bay, Australia.
He is currently a Mechatronic Specialist with the
CSIRO Autonomous Systems Laboratory in Bris-
bane, Australia. His interests lie in robots and robot
sensor systems.