No Arabic abstract
The rapid development of autonomous driving and mobile mapping calls for off-the-shelf LiDAR SLAM solutions that are adaptive to LiDARs of different specifications on various complex scenarios. To this end, we propose MULLS, an efficient, low-drift, and versatile 3D LiDAR SLAM system. For the front-end, roughly classified feature points (ground, facade, pillar, beam, etc.) are extracted from each frame using dual-threshold ground filtering and principal components analysis. Then the registration between the current frame and the local submap is accomplished efficiently by the proposed multi-metric linear least square iterative closest point algorithm. Point-to-point (plane, line) error metrics within each point class are jointly optimized with a linear approximation to estimate the ego-motion. Static feature points of the registered frame are appended into the local map to keep it updated. For the back-end, hierarchical pose graph optimization is conducted among regularly stored history submaps to reduce the drift resulting from dead reckoning. Extensive experiments are carried out on three datasets with more than 100,000 frames collected by seven types of LiDAR on various outdoor and indoor scenarios. On the KITTI benchmark, MULLS ranks among the top LiDAR-only SLAM systems with real-time performance.
This paper presents Kimera-Multi, the first multi-robot system that (i) is robust and capable of identifying and rejecting incorrect inter and intra-robot loop closures resulting from perceptual aliasing, (ii) is fully distributed and only relies on local (peer-to-peer) communication to achieve distributed localization and mapping, and (iii) builds a globally consistent metric-semantic 3D mesh model of the environment in real-time, where faces of the mesh are annotated with semantic labels. Kimera-Multi is implemented by a team of robots equipped with visual-inertial sensors. Each robot builds a local trajectory estimate and a local mesh using Kimera. When communication is available, robots initiate a distributed place recognition and robust pose graph optimization protocol based on a novel distributed graduated non-convexity algorithm. The proposed protocol allows the robots to improve their local trajectory estimates by leveraging inter-robot loop closures while being robust to outliers. Finally, each robot uses its improved trajectory estimate to correct the local mesh using mesh deformation techniques. We demonstrate Kimera-Multi in photo-realistic simulations, SLAM benchmarking datasets, and challenging outdoor datasets collected using ground robots. Both real and simulated experiments involve long trajectories (e.g., up to 800 meters per robot). The experiments show that Kimera-Multi (i) outperforms the state of the art in terms of robustness and accuracy, (ii) achieves estimation errors comparable to a centralized SLAM system while being fully distributed, (iii) is parsimonious in terms of communication bandwidth, (iv) produces accurate metric-semantic 3D meshes, and (v) is modular and can be also used for standard 3D reconstruction (i.e., without semantic labels) or for trajectory estimation (i.e., without reconstructing a 3D mesh).
This paper proposes a 3D LiDAR SLAM algorithm named Ground-SLAM, which exploits grounds in structured multi-floor environments to compress the pose drift mainly caused by LiDAR measurement bias. Ground-SLAM is developed based on the well-known pose graph optimization framework. In the front-end, motion estimation is conducted using LiDAR Odometry (LO) with a novel sensor-centric sliding map introduced, which is maintained by filtering out expired features based on the model of error propagation. At each key-frame, the sliding map is recorded as a local map. The ground nearby is extracted and modelled as an infinite planar landmark in the form of Closest Point (CP) parameterization. Then, ground planes observed at different key-frames are associated, and the ground constraints are fused into the pose graph optimization framework to compress the pose drift of LO. Finally, loop-closure detection is carried out, and the residual error is jointly minimized, which could lead to a globally consistent map. Experimental results demonstrate superior performances in the accuracy of the proposed approach.
Modern LiDAR-SLAM (L-SLAM) systems have shown excellent results in large-scale, real-world scenarios. However, they commonly have a high latency due to the expensive data association and nonlinear optimization. This paper demonstrates that actively selecting a subset of features significantly improves both the accuracy and efficiency of an L-SLAM system. We formulate the feature selection as a combinatorial optimization problem under a cardinality constraint to preserve the information matrixs spectral attributes. The stochastic-greedy algorithm is applied to approximate the optimal results in real-time. To avoid ill-conditioned estimation, we also propose a general strategy to evaluate the environments degeneracy and modify the feature number online. The proposed feature selector is integrated into a multi-LiDAR SLAM system. We validate this enhanced system with extensive experiments covering various scenarios on two sensor setups and computation platforms. We show that our approach exhibits low localization error and speedup compared to the state-of-the-art L-SLAM systems. To benefit the community, we have released the source code: https://ram-lab.com/file/site/m-loam.
Existing multi-camera SLAM systems assume synchronized shutters for all cameras, which is often not the case in practice. In this work, we propose a generalized multi-camera SLAM formulation which accounts for asynchronous sensor observations. Our framework integrates a continuous-time motion model to relate information across asynchronous multi-frames during tracking, local mapping, and loop closing. For evaluation, we collected AMV-Bench, a challenging new SLAM dataset covering 482 km of driving recorded using our asynchronous multi-camera robotic platform. AMV-Bench is over an order of magnitude larger than previous multi-view HD outdoor SLAM datasets, and covers diverse and challenging motions and environments. Our experiments emphasize the necessity of asynchronous sensor modeling, and show that the use of multiple cameras is critical towards robust and accurate SLAM in challenging outdoor scenes. For additional information, please see the project website at: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ajyang/amv-slam
Loop closure detection is an essential component of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems, which reduces the drift accumulated over time. Over the years, several deep learning approaches have been proposed to address this task, however their performance has been subpar compared to handcrafted techniques, especially while dealing with reverse loops. In this paper, we introduce the novel LCDNet that effectively detects loop closures in LiDAR point clouds by simultaneously identifying previously visited places and estimating the 6-DoF relative transformation between the current scan and the map. LCDNet is composed of a shared encoder, a place recognition head that extracts global descriptors, and a relative pose head that estimates the transformation between two point clouds. We introduce a novel relative pose head based on the unbalanced optimal transport theory that we implement in a differentiable manner to allow for end-to-end training. Extensive evaluations of LCDNet on multiple real-world autonomous driving datasets show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art loop closure detection and point cloud registration techniques by a large margin, especially while dealing with reverse loops. Moreover, we integrate our proposed loop closure detection approach into a LiDAR SLAM library to provide a complete mapping system and demonstrate the generalization ability using different sensor setup in an unseen city.