Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is essential for autonomous systems, yet achieving reliable, globally consistent pose estimation and dense mapping in complex environments remains challenging due to geometric degeneracy and sensor drift. While multi-sensor fusion addresses these issues, existing systems often lack the modularity to adapt to diverse platforms and rely on mathematically inconsistent fusion or suboptimal map representations. To address these limitations, we propose LXD-SLAM (LiDAR+X Dense SLAM), a highly versatile and unified multi-sensor fusion framework. Centered around 3D LiDAR, our system allows for the plug-and-play integration of LiDAR, Camera, IMU, Wheel Encoder, and GNSS, supporting up to 32 distinct sensor combinations. We employ a mathematically unified Iterative Error-Sate Kalman Filter with an adaptive hierarchical prediction strategy and an update step that minimizes point-to-mesh distances and visual reprojection errors. To support this, the environment is modeled using continuous multi-layered Gaussian Process (GP) sub-meshes, which enables efficient ray-to-mesh depth recovery for visual features. For global consistency, we introduce an Extended Scan Context (ESC) descriptor derived from the GP sub-meshes alongside a Bidirectional PnP optimization for robust multi-modal loop closure within a hybrid pose graph. Extensive evaluations on public datasets and real-world experiments demonstrate that LXD-SLAM matches or exceeds state-of-the-art specialized odometry solutions across various configurations while generating high-fidelity, globally consistent dense meshes in real-time. The relevant codes and data will be made available at https://github.com/peterWon/LXD-SLAM upon publication.
PennyLane is a Python 3 software framework for differentiable programming of quantum computers. The library provides a unified architecture for near-term quantum computing devices, supporting both qubit and continuous-variable paradigms. PennyLane's core feature is the ability to compute gradients of variational quantum circuits in a way that is compatible with classical techniques such as backpropagation. PennyLane thus extends the automatic differentiation algorithms common in optimization and machine learning to include quantum and hybrid computations. A plugin system makes the framework compatible with any gate-based quantum simulator or hardware. We provide plugins for hardware providers including the Xanadu Cloud, Amazon Braket, and IBM Quantum, allowing PennyLane optimizations to be run on publicly accessible quantum devices. On the classical front, PennyLane interfaces with accelerated machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, and Autograd. PennyLane can be used for the optimization of variational quantum eigensolvers, quantum approximate optimization, quantum machine learning models, and many other applications.
In this paper, we proposed a novel and practical solution for the real-time indoor localization of autonomous driving in parking lots. High-level landmarks, the parking slots, are extracted and enriched with labels to avoid the aliasing of low-level visual features. We then proposed a robust method for detecting incorrect data associations between parking slots and further extended the optimization framework by dynamically eliminating suboptimal data associations. Visual fiducial markers are introduced to improve the overall precision. As a result, a semantic map of the parking lot can be established fully automatically and robustly. We experimented the performance of real-time localization based on the map using our autonomous driving platform TiEV, and the average accuracy of 0.3m track tracing can be achieved at a speed of 10kph.
TiEV is an autonomous driving platform implemented by Tongji University of China. The vehicle is drive-by-wire and is fully powered by electricity. We devised the software system of TiEV from scratch, which is capable of driving the vehicle autonomously in urban paths as well as on fast express roads. We describe our whole system, especially novel modules of probabilistic perception fusion, incremental mapping, the 1st and the 2nd planning and the overall safety concern. TiEV finished 2016 and 2017 Intelligent Vehicle Future Challenge of China held at Changshu. We show our experiences on the development of autonomous vehicles and future trends.