Range sensors evaluation under smoky conditions for robotics applications

In the paper we present performance reviews of some of the most popular range sensors in robotics under smoky conditions. The experiments were conducted in the same environment with the same source of smoke of different densities. The range sensors were setup to produce 3D point clouds. To evaluate the performance of the sensors two metrics were used: the total number of valid points produced by the 3D sensors and the number of points which could be extracted as fitting to a planar surface, both in respect to the smoke density.