This paper reports on a novel method for LiDAR odometry estimation, which completely parameterizes the system with dual quaternions. To accomplish this, the features derived from the point cloud, including edges, surfaces, and Stable Triangle Descriptor (STD), along with the optimization problem, are expressed in the dual quaternion set. This approach enables the direct combination of translation and orientation errors via dual quaternion operations, greatly enhancing pose estimation, as demonstrated in comparative experiments against other state-of-the-art methods. Our approach reduced drift error compared to other LiDAR-only-odometry methods, especially in scenarios with sharp curves and aggressive movements with large angular displacement. DualQuat-LOAM is benchmarked against several public datasets. In the KITTI dataset it has a translation and rotation error of 0.79% and 0.0039°/m, with an average run time of 53 ms.
Nagoya University（名古屋大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（日本产业技术综合研究所）
This paper presents a LiDAR odometry estimation framework called Generalized LOAM. Our proposed method is generalized in that it can seamlessly fuse various local geometric shapes around points to improve the position estimation accuracy compared to the conventional LiDAR odometry and mapping (LOAM) method. To utilize continuous geometric features for LiDAR odometry estimation, we incorporate tiny neural networks into a generalized iterative closest point (GICP) algorithm. These neural networks improve the data association metric and the matching cost function using local geometric features. E…
Hi-LOAM: Hierarchical Implicit Neural Fields for LiDAR Odometry and Mapping
School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University（云南大学信息科学与工程学院）；School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学信息与电子学院）；Yunnan Key Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and Computing, Yunnan University（云南大学云南省智能系统与计算重点实验室）
LiDAR odometry can achieve accurate vehicle pose estimation for short driving range or in small-scale environments, but for long driving range or in large-scale environments, the accuracy deteriorates as a result of cumulative estimation errors. This drawback necessitates the inclusion of loop closure detection in a SLAM framework to suppress the adverse effects of cumulative errors. To improve the accuracy of pose estimation, we propose a new LiDAR-based SLAM method which uses F-LOAM as LiDAR odometry, Scan Context for loop closure detection, and GTSAM for global optimization. In our approach…
National Innovation Institute of Defence Technology, PLA Academy of Military Sciences（中国人民解放军军事科学院国防科技创新研究院）；PLA Information Engineering University（中国人民解放军信息工程大学）
Traditional LiDAR odometry (LO) systems mainly leverage geometric information obtained from the traversed surroundings to register laser scans and estimate LiDAR ego-motion, while it may be unreliable in dynamic or unstructured environments. This paper proposes InTEn-LOAM, a low-drift and robust LiDAR odometry and mapping method that fully exploits implicit information of laser sweeps (i.e., geometric, intensity, and temporal characteristics). Scanned points are projected to cylindrical images, which facilitate the efficient and adaptive extraction of various types of features, i.e., ground, b…
KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)（韩国科学技术院）
Numerous researchers have conducted studies to achieve fast and robust ground-optimized LiDAR odometry methods for terrestrial mobile platforms. In particular, ground-optimized LiDAR odometry usually employs ground segmentation as a preprocessing method. This is because most of the points in a 3D point cloud captured by a 3D LiDAR sensor on a terrestrial platform are from the ground. However, the effect of the performance of ground segmentation on LiDAR odometry is still not closely examined. In this paper, a robust ground-optimized LiDAR odometry framework is proposed to facilitate the study …
Inland-LOAM: Voxel-Based Structural Semantic LiDAR Odometry and Mapping for Inland Waterway Navigation
Division of Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven（机械工程系机器人、自动化与机电系，KU莱顿大学）；Division of Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence (DTAI) in the Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven（计算机科学系声明语言与人工智能系（DTAI），KU莱顿大学）
LiDAR odometry and mapping (LOAM) has been playing an important role in autonomous vehicles, due to its ability to simultaneously localize the robot's pose and build high-precision, high-resolution maps of the surrounding environment. This enables autonomous navigation and safe path planning of autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we present a robust, real-time LOAM algorithm for LiDARs with small FoV and irregular samplings. By taking effort on both front-end and back-end, we address several fundamental challenges arising from such LiDARs, and achieve better performance in both precision and e…
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has wide robotic applications such as autonomous driving and unmanned aerial vehicles. Both computational efficiency and localization accuracy are of great importance towards a good SLAM system. Existing works on LiDAR based SLAM often formulate the problem as two modules: scan-to-scan match and scan-to-map refinement. Both modules are solved by iterative calculation which are computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a general solution that aims to provide a computationally efficient and accurate framework for LiDAR based SLAM. Specifica…
This paper presents a loop closure method to correct the long-term drift in LiDAR odometry and mapping (LOAM). Our proposed method computes the 2D histogram of keyframes, a local map patch, and uses the normalized cross-correlation of the 2D histograms as the similarity metric between the current keyframe and those in the map. We show that this method is fast, invariant to rotation, and produces reliable and accurate loop detection. The proposed method is implemented with careful engineering and integrated into the LOAM algorithm, forming a complete and practical system ready to use. To benefi…
Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has drawn increasing interests in autonomous driving. However, LiDAR-SLAM suffers from accumulating errors which can be significantly mitigated by Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Precise Point Positioning (PPP), an accurate GNSS operation mode independent of base stations, gains more popularity in unmanned systems. Considering the features of the two technologies, LiDAR-SLAM and PPP, this paper proposes a SLAM system, namely P3-LOAM (PPP based LiDAR Odometry and Mapping) which couples LiDAR-SLAM a…
In this paper, we present SROM, a novel real-time Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system for autonomous vehicles. The keynote of the paper showcases SROM's ability to maintain localization at low sampling rates or at high linear or angular velocities where most popular LiDAR based localization approaches get degraded fast. We also demonstrate SROM to be computationally efficient and capable of handling high-speed maneuvers. It also achieves low drifts without the need for any other sensors like IMU and/or GPS. Our method has a two-layer structure wherein first, an approximate esti…
Integrating multiple LiDAR sensors can significantly enhance a robot's perception of the environment, enabling it to capture adequate measurements for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Indeed, solid-state LiDARs can bring in high resolution at a low cost to traditional spinning LiDARs in robotic applications. However, their reduced field of view (FoV) limits performance, particularly indoors. In this paper, we propose a tightly-coupled multi-modal multi-LiDAR-inertial SLAM system for surveying and mapping tasks. By taking advantage of both solid-state and spinnings LiDARs, and buil…
A lidar odometry method, integrating into the computation the knowledge about the physics of the sensor, is proposed. A model of measurement error enables higher precision in estimation of the point normal covariance. Adjacent laser beams are used in an outlier correspondence rejection scheme. The method is ranked in the KITTI's leaderboard with 1.37% positioning error. 3.67% is achieved in comparison with the LOAM method on the internal dataset.
Versatile LiDAR-Inertial Odometry With SE (2) Constraints for Ground Vehicles
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电气与电子工程学院）；School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电气与电子工程学院）；KINDI Center for Computing Research, College of Engineering, Qatar University（卡塔尔大学工程学院金迪计算研究中心）
本文提出一种紧耦合 LiDAR-惯性 SLAM 框架，将地面车辆位姿参数化于 SE(2)，并把越界运动扰动纳入噪声模型，融合传感器与运动先验以提升室内外定位精度和鲁棒性。
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is considered to be an essential capability for intelligent vehicles and mobile robots. However, most of the current lidar SLAM approaches are based on the assumption of a static environment. Hence the localization in a dynamic environment with multiple moving objects is actually unreliable. The paper proposes a dynamic SLAM framework RF-LIO, building on LIO-SAM, which adds adaptive multi-resolution range images and uses tightly-coupled lidar inertial odometry to first remove moving objects, and then match lidar scan to the submap. Thus, it can obta…
LiDAR-based SLAM system is admittedly more accurate and stable than others, while its loop closure detection is still an open issue. With the development of 3D semantic segmentation for point cloud, semantic information can be obtained conveniently and steadily, essential for high-level intelligence and conductive to SLAM. In this paper, we present a novel semantic-aided LiDAR SLAM with loop closure based on LOAM, named SA-LOAM, which leverages semantics in odometry as well as loop closure detection. Specifically, we propose a semantic-assisted ICP, including semantically matching, downsamplin…
LiDAR odometry is one of the essential parts of LiDAR simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, existing LiDAR odometry tends to match a new scan simply iteratively with previous fixed-pose scans, gradually accumulating errors. Furthermore, as an effective joint optimization mechanism, bundle adjustment (BA) cannot be directly introduced into real-time odometry due to the intensive computation of large-scale global landmarks. Therefore, this letter designs a new strategy named a landmark map for bundle adjustment odometry (LMBAO) in LiDAR SLAM to solve these problems. First, BA-ba…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Combining multiple LiDARs enables a robot to maximize its perceptual awareness of environments and obtain sufficient measurements, which is promising for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). This paper proposes a system to achieve robust and simultaneous extrinsic calibration, odometry, and mapping for multiple LiDARs. Our approach starts with measurement preprocessing to extract edge and planar features from raw measurements. After a motion and extrinsic initialization procedure, a sliding window-based multi-LiDAR odometry runs onboard to estimate poses with online calibration refine…
Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；Université de Sherbrooke（舍布鲁克大学）
This work presents an extension of graph-based SLAM methods to exploit the potential of 3D laser scans for loop detection. Every high-dimensional point cloud is replaced by a compact global descriptor, whereby a trained detector decides whether a loop exists. Searching for loops is performed locally in a variable space to consider the odometry drift. Since closing a wrong loop has fatal consequences, an extensive verification is performed before acceptance. The proposed algorithm is implemented as an extension of the widely used state-of-the-art library RTAB-Map, and several experiments show t…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) based on laser sensors has been widely adopted by mobile robots and autonomous vehicles. These SLAM systems are required to support accurate localization with limited computational resources. In particular, point cloud registration, i.e., the process of matching and aligning multiple LiDAR scans collected at multiple locations in a global coordinate framework, has been deemed as the bottleneck step in SLAM. In this paper, we propose a feature filtering algorithm, PFilter, that can filter out invalid features and can thus greatly alleviate this bottl…
Impact of 3D LiDAR Resolution in Graph-based SLAM Approaches: A Comparative Study
University of Coimbra（科英布拉大学）；Data Science Institute, Universität Greifswald（格赖夫斯瓦尔德大学数据科学研究所）；Institute of Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学计算机科学研究所）
Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学信息技术学院）
We introduce a novel method for odometry estimation using convolutional neural networks from 3D LiDAR scans. The original sparse data are encoded into 2D matrices for the training of proposed networks and for the prediction. Our networks show significantly better precision in the estimation of translational motion parameters comparing with state of the art method LOAM, while achieving real-time performance. Together with IMU support, high quality odometry estimation and LiDAR data registration is realized. Moreover, we propose alternative CNNs trained for the prediction of rotational motion pa…
Ego-pose estimation and dynamic object tracking are two key issues in an autonomous driving system. Two assumptions are often made for them, i.e. the static world assumption of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and the exact ego-pose assumption of object tracking, respectively. However, these assumptions are difficult to hold in highly dynamic road scenarios where SLAM and object tracking become correlated and mutually beneficial. In this paper, DL-SLOT, a dynamic Lidar SLAM and object tracking method is proposed. This method integrates the state estimations of both the ego vehicle …
Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学机器人科学与工程学院）；Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）
In this paper, we propose a novel laser-inertial odometry and mapping method to achieve real-time, low-drift and robust pose estimation in large-scale highway environments. The proposed method is mainly composed of four sequential modules, namely scan pre-processing module, dynamic object detection module, laser-inertial odometry module and laser mapping module. Scan pre-processing module uses inertial measurements to compensate the motion distortion of each laser scan. Then, the dynamic object detection module is used to detect and remove dynamic objects from each laser scan by applying CNN s…
