Robust Odometry and Mapping for Multi-LiDAR Systems with Online Extrinsic Calibration

Understand

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 refinement and convergence identification.