  This paper presents a novel technique to correct for bias in a classical
estimator using a learning approach. We apply a learned bias correction to a
lidar-only motion estimation pipeline. Our technique trains a Gaussian process
(GP) regression model using data with ground truth. The inputs to the model are
high-level features derived from the geometry of the point-clouds, and the
outputs are the predicted biases between poses computed by the estimator and
the ground truth. The predicted biases are applied as a correction to the poses
computed by the estimator.
  Our technique is evaluated on over 50km of lidar data, which includes the
KITTI odometry benchmark and lidar datasets collected around the University of
Toronto campus. After applying the learned bias correction, we obtained
significant improvements to lidar odometry in all datasets tested. We achieved
around 10% reduction in errors on all datasets from an already accurate lidar
odometry algorithm, at the expense of only less than 1% increase in
computational cost at run-time.
