F-LOAM : Fast LiDAR Odometry and Mapping

• Main Authors: Wang, Han, Wang, Chen, Chen, Chun-Lin, Xie, Lihua
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Distortion; Feature extraction; Laser radar; Location awareness; Pose estimation; Remotely guided vehicles; Simultaneous localization and mapping
• ISSN: 2153-0866
• DOI: 10.1109/IROS51168.2021.9636655

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. Specifically, we adopt a non-iterative two-stage distortion compensation method to reduce the computational cost. For each scan input, the edge and planar features are extracted and matched to a local edge map and a local plane map separately, where the local smoothness is also considered for iterative pose optimization. Thorough experiments are performed to evaluate its performance in challenging scenarios, including localization for a warehouse Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) and a public dataset on autonomous driving. The proposed method achieves a competitive localization accuracy with a processing rate of more than 10 Hz in the public dataset evaluation, which provides a good trade-off between performance and computational cost for practical applications. It is one of the most accurate and fastest open-sourced SLAM systems 1 in KITTI dataset ranking.