An evaluation of CFEAR Radar Odometry

This article describes the method CFEAR Radar odometry, submitted to a competition at the Radar in Robotics workshop, ICRA 2024. CFEAR is an efficient and accurate method for spinning 2D radar odometry that generalizes well across environments. This article presents an overview of the odometry pipeline with new experiments on the public Boreas dataset. We show that a real-time capable configuration of CFEAR -- with its original parameter se -- yields surprisingly low drift in the Boreas dataset. Additionally, we discuss an improved implementation and solving strategy that enables the most accurate configuration to run in real-time with improved robustness, reaching as low as 0.66% translation drift at a frame rate of 68 Hz. A recent release of the source code is available to the community https://github.com/dan11003/CFEAR_Radarodometry_code_public, and we publish the evaluation from this article https://github.com/dan11003/cfear_2024_workshop.