MLIO: Multiple LiDARs and Inertial Odometry

Abstract

With the decreasing cost of LiDAR sensors, sensor setups with multiple LiDARs are becoming available. In such advanced setups with multiple LiDARs the sensor temporal asynchronicity and spatial miscalibration are critical factors for vehicle localization increasing measurement uncertainty. Hence, simple merging of synchronized point clouds as done in some literature can lead to sub-optimal results. To tackle this problem we propose MLIO, a factor graph-based odometry computation algorithm that fuses multiple LiDARs with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and provides an accurate solution mitigating the effect of temporal asynchronisity and spatial miscalibration.The proposed algorithm is validated using a custom dataset. We compare the proposed algorithm with the state-of-the-art LiDAR-only odometry algorithms, such as KISS-ICP, and LiDAR-IMU fusion LIO-SAM and demonstrate its superiority. We were able to achieve up to 40% and 16% increment in positional and orientation accuracy compared to KISS-ICP and 25% increment in positional accuracy compared to LIO-SAM.