Autonomous Data Acquisition of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) Using LiDAR-based Mobile Robot

In this paper, we propose a ground mobile robot that can perform both surface mapping and subsurface mapping using a three-dimensional LiDAR Simultaneous Localization and Mapping System (3D LiDAR SLAM system) and a ground penetrating radar (GPR). The robot consists of a mobile platform equipped with a 3D LiDAR sensor and a GPR antenna mounted on a fixed chassis. The robot can autonomously navigate the environment and collect data from both the surface and the subsurface. The surface mapping is done by using the 3D LiDAR sensor of ±3 cm range accuracy to observe the point cloud of the terrain, which is then processed to generate the 3D surface map. The subsurface mapping is done by using the GPR antenna to emit electromagnetic pulses into the soil and receive their reflections, which are then processed to generate a 3D subsurface map. Then, we can fuse the surface and subsurface maps to obtain a comprehensive representation of the terrain. We demonstrate the performance of our robot in real-world scenarios, such as bridges. We show that our robot can achieve high accuracy and efficiency in surface mapping tasks and GPR data acquisition.