Multi-robot LiDAR SLAM: a practical case study in underground tunnel environments

TL;DR

The pipeline of a decentralized LiDAR SLAM system is analyzed to study the current limitations of the state of the art, and a significant source of failures is discovered, i.e., that the loop detection is the source of too many false positives.

Abstract

Multi-robot SLAM aims at localizing and building a map with multiple robots, interacting with each other. In the work described in this article, we analyze the pipeline of a decentralized LiDAR SLAM system to study the current limitations of the state of the art, and we discover a significant source of failures, i.e., that the loop detection is the source of too many false positives. We therefore develop and propose a new heuristic to overcome these limitations. The environment taken as reference in this work is the highly challenging case of underground tunnels. We also highlight potential new research areas still under-explored.

Figures (15)

• Figure S1: Example of a bireflex target, used for aligning the scans to generate the mesh environment
• Figure S2: Ground truth trajectories of the four robots, displayed over the mesh of the environment. Starting points shown with colored a dot.
• Figure S3: Comparison of Absolute Trajectory error for KISS-ICP and Kinematic ICP. On the x axis the 4 trajectories, on the y axis the ATE, in meters. The error is represented as a standard boxplot with the median error shown as line in the middle of the box.
• Figure A1: g2o graph visualization for the robot pair (0,1)
• Figure A2: g2o graph visualization for the robot pair (0,2)