Hokuyo Lidar: Sensor drift during rotation

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Hey there. I'm running into a weird issue where I'm not sure whether to blame hardware or software (and if software, exactly what component). I have a simple differential drive robot with a Hokuyo URG-04LX-UG01 lidar mounted on the front. The odometry of the robot is provided using a fusion of an onboard IMU and encoder readings, and seems to be fairly accurate. The lidar is hooked up through urg_node with a TF frame that is appropriately offset from the base_link. I've set up RViz to visualize the robot model in the odom frame, then added the appropriate LaserScan topic.

If the robot drives forwards or backwards, the LaserScan stays fairly fixed in place (confirmed by increasing the decay of the topic in RViz). The same goes for constant rotating motion. However, when the robot first starts accelerating in a rotation, the laser scan gains a considerable rotational drift in the same direction and retains that drift until the robot stops moving. Once it stops moving, it recovers back to it's original normal position.

I've captured this video that shows in more detail what I mean. As you can see the scan rotates quite a bit more than the robot when it first starts moving, but it retains that offset for the entirety of the rotation. Once the robot stops, the rotation drift recovers. At the end of the video I move for a bit longer, showing that the rotational drift stays constant even during longer rotation (only really drifting when the robot starts accelerating or decelerating). You can also see that the robot model (powered by the fused odometry) has a constant rotation speed, indicating that it is not the TF frame that is abruptly changing.

The same drift happens very _very_ slightly when moving forwards/backwards (to the point where it is almost unnoticable), but obviously in the forward/backward direction. The drift is not an issue if the robot rotates very slowly.

Is this an inherent hardware issue (caused by the rotation interfering with the rotation of the mirror within the lidar) or is this an odometry error on my end that only manifests during acceleration/deceleration? The drifts end up causing lots of issues with AMCL later on, which in turn makes navigation iffy.