Real-Time Simultaneous Localization and Mapping with LiDAR intensity
This addresses a critical failure point in robot odometry for unstructured environments, though it is an incremental improvement over existing LiDAR methods.
The paper tackles the geometry degeneracy problem in LiDAR-based SLAM in unstructured environments by using LiDAR intensity images to extract feature points, enabling real-time operation with high accuracy under illumination changes and low-texture conditions.
We propose a novel real-time LiDAR intensity image-based simultaneous localization and mapping method , which addresses the geometry degeneracy problem in unstructured environments. Traditional LiDAR-based front-end odometry mostly relies on geometric features such as points, lines and planes. A lack of these features in the environment can lead to the failure of the entire odometry system. To avoid this problem, we extract feature points from the LiDAR-generated point cloud that match features identified in LiDAR intensity images. We then use the extracted feature points to perform scan registration and estimate the robot ego-movement. For the back-end, we jointly optimize the distance between the corresponding feature points, and the point to plane distance for planes identified in the map. In addition, we use the features extracted from intensity images to detect loop closure candidates from previous scans and perform pose graph optimization. Our experiments show that our method can run in real time with high accuracy and works well with illumination changes, low-texture, and unstructured environments.