Comparison and Evaluation of 2D and 3D Range Sensors

For mobile robots range sensors are important to perceive the environment. Sensors that can measure in a 3D volume are especially significant for outdoor robotics, because this environment is often highly unstructured. The quality of the data gathered by those sensors influences all algorithms relying on it. In this paper thus the precision of several 2D and 2.5D sensors is measured at different ranges and different incidence angles. The results of all tests are presented and analyzed.