Localization and mapping are key requirements for autonomous mobile systems to perform navigation and interaction tasks. Iterative Closest Point (ICP) is widely applied for LiDAR scan-matching in the robotic community. In addition, the standard ICP algorithm only considers geometric information when iteratively searching for the nearest point. However, ICP individually cannot achieve accurate point-cloud registration performance in challenging environments such as dynamic environments and highways. Moreover, the computation of searching for the closest points is an expensive step in the ICP algorithm, which is limited to meet real-time requirements, especially when dealing with large-scale point-cloud data. In this paper, we propose a segment-based scan-matching framework for six degree-of-freedom pose estimation and mapping. The LiDAR generates a large number of ground points when scanning, but many of these points are useless and increase the burden of subsequent processing. To address this problem, we first apply an image-based ground-point extraction method to filter out noise and ground points. The point cloud after removing the ground points is then segmented into disjoint sets. After this step, a standard point-to-point ICP is applied into to calculate the six degree-of-freedom transformation between consecutive scans. Furthermore, once closed loops are detected in the environment, a 6D graph-optimization algorithm for global relaxation (6D simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)) is employed. Experiments based on publicly available KITTI datasets show that our method requires less runtime while at the same time achieves higher pose estimation accuracy compared with the standard ICP method and its variants.

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Novel pentagonal photonic crystal fiber with high birefringence, large flattened negative dispersion, and high nonlinearity is proposed. The dispersion and birefringence properties of this structure are simulated and analyzed numerically based on the full vector finite element method (FEM). Numerical results indicate that the fiber obtains a large average dispersion of -611.9  ps/nm/km over 1,460-1,625 nm and -474  ps/nm/km over 1425-1675 nm wavelength bands for two kinds of optimized designs, respectively. In addition, the proposed PCF shows a high birefringence of 1.67×10^-2 and 1.75×10^-2 at the operating wavelength of 1550 nm. Moreover, the influence of the possible variation in the parameters during the fabrication process on the dispersion and birefringence properties is studied. The proposed PCF would have important applications in polarization maintaining transmission systems, residual dispersion compensation, supercontinuum generation, and the design of widely tunable wavelength converters based on four-wave mixing.

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