Spherical robots offer unique advantages for mapping applications in hazardous or confined environments, thanks to their protective shells and omnidirectional mobility. This work presents two complementary spherical mapping systems: a lightweight, non-actuated design and an actuated variant featuring internal pendulum-driven locomotion. Both systems are equipped with a Livox Mid-360 solid-state LiDAR sensor and run LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO) algorithms on resource-constrained hardware. We assess the mapping accuracy of these systems by comparing the resulting 3D point-clouds from the LIO algorithms to a ground truth map. The results indicate that the performance of state-of-the-art LIO algorithms deteriorates due to the high dynamic movement introduced by the spherical locomotion, leading to globally inconsistent maps and sometimes unrecoverable drift.
@article{arxiv.2509.10032,
title = {Design and Evaluation of Two Spherical Systems for Mobile 3D Mapping},
author = {Marawan Khalil and Fabian Arzberger and Andreas Nüchter},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.10032},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
6 Pages, 9 figures, International Workshop 3D-AdViCE in conjunction with 12th ECMR 2025