From Underground Mines to Offices: A Versatile and Robust Framework for Range-Inertial SLAM

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is an essential component of autonomous robotic applications and self-driving vehicles, enabling them to understand and operate in their environment. Many SLAM systems have been proposed in the last decade, but they are often complex to adapt to different settings or sensor setups. In this work, we present LiDAR Graph-SLAM (LG-SLAM), a versatile range-inertial SLAM framework that can be adapted to different types of sensors and environments, from underground mines to offices with minimal parameter tuning. Our system integrates range, inertial and GNSS measurements into a graph-based optimization framework. We also use a refined submap management approach and a robust loop closure method that effectively accounts for uncertainty in the identification and validation of putative loop closures, ensuring global consistency and robustness. Enabled by a parallelized architecture and GPU integration, our system achieves pose estimation at LiDAR frame rate, along with online loop closing and graph optimization. We validate our system in diverse environments using public datasets and real-world data, consistently achieving an average error below 20 cm and outperforming other state-of-the-art algorithms.

G-Loc: Tightly-coupled Graph Localization with Prior Topo-metric Information

Localization in already mapped environments is a critical component in many robotics and automotive applications, where previously acquired information can be exploited along with sensor fusion to provide robust and accurate localization estimates. In this work, we offer a new perspective on map-based localization by reusing prior topological and metric information. Thus, we reformulate this long-studied problem to go beyond the mere use of metric maps. Our framework seamlessly integrates LiDAR, iner\-tial and GNSS measurements, and scan-to-map registrations in a sliding window graph fashion, which allows to accommodate the uncertainty of each observation. The modularity of our framework allows it to work with different sensor configurations (\textit{e.g.,} LiDAR resolutions, GNSS denial) and environmental conditions (\textit{e.g.,} map-less regions, large environments). We have conducted different validation experiments, including deployment in a real-world automotive application, demonstrating the accuracy, efficiency, and versatility of our system in online localization.