Elastic and Efficient LiDAR Reconstruction for Large-Scale Exploration Tasks
This enables real-time, high-resolution mapping for robots in large environments like outdoors or underground, though it is incremental as it builds on existing RGB-D techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of efficient 3D LiDAR reconstruction for large-scale robot exploration by developing a framework that reconstructs up to 60 m range at 3 Hz with ~5 cm resolution, outperforming state-of-the-art methods limited to 25 cm resolution or 20 m range.
We present an efficient, elastic 3D LiDAR reconstruction framework which can reconstruct up to maximum LiDAR ranges (60 m) at multiple frames per second, thus enabling robot exploration in large-scale environments. Our approach only requires a CPU. We focus on three main challenges of large-scale reconstruction: integration of long-range LiDAR scans at high frequency, the capacity to deform the reconstruction after loop closures are detected, and scalability for long-duration exploration. Our system extends upon a state-of-the-art efficient RGB-D volumetric reconstruction technique, called supereight, to support LiDAR scans and a newly developed submapping technique to allow for dynamic correction of the 3D reconstruction. We then introduce a novel pose graph clustering and submap fusion feature to make the proposed system more scalable for large environments. We evaluate the performance using two public datasets including outdoor exploration with a handheld device and a drone, and with a mobile robot exploring an underground room network. Experimental results demonstrate that our system can reconstruct at 3 Hz with 60 m sensor range and ~5 cm resolution, while state-of-the-art approaches can only reconstruct to 25 cm resolution or 20 m range at the same frequency.