MetroLoc: Metro Vehicle Mapping and Localization with LiDAR-Camera-Inertial Integration
This work addresses localization and mapping for metro vehicles, an extreme scenario, with potential applications in rail monitoring, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing sensor fusion techniques with specific feature enhancements.
The authors tackled the problem of large-scale metro vehicle localization and mapping by proposing MetroLoc, a multi-modal sensor fusion framework that integrates LiDAR, camera, and inertial data, achieving more accurate and robust performance than state-of-the-art methods with real-time capabilities.
We propose an accurate and robust multi-modal sensor fusion framework, MetroLoc, towards one of the most extreme scenarios, the large-scale metro vehicle localization and mapping. MetroLoc is built atop an IMU-centric state estimator that tightly couples light detection and ranging (LiDAR), visual, and inertial information with the convenience of loosely coupled methods. The proposed framework is composed of three submodules: IMU odometry, LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO), and Visual-inertial odometry (VIO). The IMU is treated as the primary sensor, which achieves the observations from LIO and VIO to constrain the accelerometer and gyroscope biases. Compared to previous point-only LIO methods, our approach leverages more geometry information by introducing both line and plane features into motion estimation. The VIO also utilizes the environmental structure information by employing both lines and points. Our proposed method has been extensively tested in the long-during metro environments with a maintenance vehicle. Experimental results show the system more accurate and robust than the state-of-the-art approaches with real-time performance. Besides, we develop a series of Virtual Reality (VR) applications towards efficient, economical, and interactive rail vehicle state and trackside infrastructure monitoring, which has already been deployed to an outdoor testing railroad.