# A Normal Distribution Transform-Based Radar Odometry Designed For Scanning and Automotive Radars

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.07908 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07908/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [RadarSplat: Radar Gaussian Splatting for High-Fidelity Data Synthesis and 3D Reconstruction of Autonomous Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01379/) (2025)
- [Radar Occupancy Prediction with Lidar Supervision while Preserving Long-Range Sensing and Penetrating Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04282/) (2021)
- [Equi-RO: A 4D mmWave Radar Odometry via Equivariant Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20674/) (2025)
- [RaNDT SLAM: Radar SLAM Based on Intensity-Augmented Normal Distributions Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11576/) (2024)
- [RadarSplat-RIO: Indoor Radar-Inertial Odometry with Gaussian Splatting-Based Radar Bundle Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13492/) (2026)
- [RadarLCD: Learnable Radar-based Loop Closure Detection Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07094/) (2023)
- [Dr-BA: Separable Optimization for Direct Radar Bundle Adjustment & Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07041/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing radar sensors can be classified into automotive and scanning radars. While most radar odometry (RO) methods are only designed for a specific type of radar, our RO method adapts to both scanning and automotive radars. Our RO is simple yet effective, where the pipeline consists of thresholding, probabilistic submap building, and an NDT-based radar scan matching. The proposed RO has been tested on two public radar datasets: the Oxford Radar RobotCar dataset and the nuScenes dataset, which provide scanning and automotive radar data respectively. The results show that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art RO using either automotive or scanning radar by reducing translational error by 51% and 30%, respectively, and rotational error by 17% and 29%, respectively. Besides, we show that our RO achieves centimeter-level accuracy as lidar odometry, and automotive and scanning RO have similar accuracy.