Qiyang Lyu

Qiyang Lyu, Zhenyu Wu, Wei Wang et al.

Localization of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in enclosed or semi-enclosed environments such as offices, hotels, hospitals, indoor parking facilities, and underground spaces where GPS signals are weak or unavailable remains a major obstacle to the deployment of fully autonomous systems. Infrastructure-based localization approaches, such as QR codes and RFID, are constrained by high installation and maintenance costs as well as limited flexibility, while onboard sensor-based methods, including LiDAR- and vision-based solutions, are affected by ambiguous geometric features and frequent occlusions caused by dynamic obstacles such as pedestrians. Ambient magnetic field (AMF)-based localization has therefore attracted growing interest in recent years because it does not rely on external infrastructure or geometric features, making it well-suited for AMR applications such as service robots and security robots. However, magnetometer measurements are often corrupted by distortions caused by ferromagnetic materials present on the sensor platform, which bias the AMF and degrade localization reliability. As a result, accurate magnetometer calibration to estimate distortion parameters becomes essential. Conventional calibration methods that rely on rotating the magnetometer are impractical for large and heavy platforms. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a robust simultaneous localization and calibration (RoSLAC) approach based on alternating optimization, which iteratively and efficiently estimates both the platform pose and magnetometer calibration parameters. Extensive evaluations conducted in high-fidelity simulation and real-world environments demonstrate that the proposed RoSLAC method achieves high localization accuracy while maintaining low computational cost compared with state-of-the-art magnetometer calibration techniques.

Hongming Shen, Xun Chen, Yulin Hui et al.

Existing LGL methods typically consider only partial information (e.g., geometric features) from LiDAR observations or are designed for homogeneous LiDAR sensors, overlooking the uniformity in LGL. In this work, a uniform LGL method is proposed, termed UniLGL, which simultaneously achieves spatial and material uniformity, as well as sensor-type uniformity. The key idea of the proposed method is to encode the complete point cloud, which contains both geometric and material information, into a pair of BEV images (i.e., a spatial BEV image and an intensity BEV image). An end-to-end multi-BEV fusion network is designed to extract uniform features, equipping UniLGL with spatial and material uniformity. To ensure robust LGL across heterogeneous LiDAR sensors, a viewpoint invariance hypothesis is introduced, which replaces the conventional translation equivariance assumption commonly used in existing LPR networks and supervises UniLGL to achieve sensor-type uniformity in both global descriptors and local feature representations. Finally, based on the mapping between local features on the 2D BEV image and the point cloud, a robust global pose estimator is derived that determines the global minimum of the global pose on SE(3) without requiring additional registration. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed uniform LGL, extensive benchmarks are conducted in real-world environments, and the results show that the proposed UniLGL is demonstratively competitive compared to other State-of-the-Art LGL methods. Furthermore, UniLGL has been deployed on diverse platforms, including full-size trucks and agile Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), to enable high-precision localization and mapping as well as multi-MAV collaborative exploration in port and forest environments, demonstrating the applicability of UniLGL in industrial and field scenarios.

Jun Zhang, Huayang Zhuge, Yiyao Liu et al.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is moving towards a robust perception age. However, LiDAR- and visual- SLAM may easily fail in adverse conditions (rain, snow, smoke and fog, etc.). In comparison, SLAM based on 4D Radar, thermal camera and IMU can work robustly. But only a few literature can be found. A major reason is the lack of related datasets, which seriously hinders the research. Even though some datasets are proposed based on 4D radar in past four years, they are mainly designed for object detection, rather than SLAM. Furthermore, they normally do not include thermal camera. Therefore, in this paper, NTU4DRadLM is presented to meet this requirement. The main characteristics are: 1) It is the only dataset that simultaneously includes all 6 sensors: 4D radar, thermal camera, IMU, 3D LiDAR, visual camera and RTK GPS. 2) Specifically designed for SLAM tasks, which provides fine-tuned ground truth odometry and intentionally formulated loop closures. 3) Considered both low-speed robot platform and fast-speed unmanned vehicle platform. 4) Covered structured, unstructured and semi-structured environments. 5) Considered both middle- and large- scale outdoor environments, i.e., the 6 trajectories range from 246m to 6.95km. 6) Comprehensively evaluated three types of SLAM algorithms. Totally, the dataset is around 17.6km, 85mins, 50GB and it will be accessible from this link: https://github.com/junzhang2016/NTU4DRadLM