Characterization of the Hokuyo UBG-04LX-F01 2D Laser Rangefinder

This paper presents a characterization of the Hokuyo UBG-04LX-F01 laser rangefinder (LRF). The Hokuyo LRFs are suitable for a small mobile robot due to their small size and light weight. In particular, the scan frequency of Hokuyo UBG-04LX-F01 is higher than those of the previous LRFs in its price range. However, there is no research on characterizing this LRF for the convenience of practical use. Therefore, this paper characterizes the Hokuyo UBG-04LX-F01 and analyzes the effect of the target properties, such as incidence angle, color, brightness, and material, by measuring the distance to a target. The experimental results show that the measurement error is strongly influenced by the incidence angle and the brightness of the target surface. From the experimental results, a calibration model is also proposed to measure the accurate distance to a target.