A Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)/Inertial Navigation System (INS)/Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) integrated navigation system based on graph optimization is proposed and implemented in this paper. The navigation results are obtained by the information fusion of the GNSS position, Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) preintegration result and the relative pose from the 3D probability map matching with graph optimizing. The sliding window method was adopted to ensure that the computational load of the graph optimization does not increase with time. Land vehicle tests were conducted, and the results show that the proposed GNSS/INS/LiDAR-SLAM integrated navigation system can effectively improve the navigation positioning accuracy compared to GNSS/INS and other current GNSS/INS/LiDAR methods. During the simulation of one-minute periods of GNSS outages, compared to the GNSS/INS integrated navigation system, the root mean square (RMS) of the position errors in the North and East directions of the proposed navigation system are reduced by approximately 82.2% and 79.6%, respectively, and the position error in the vertical direction and attitude errors are equivalent. Compared to the benchmark method of GNSS/INS/LiDAR-Google Cartographer, the RMS of the position errors in the North, East and vertical directions decrease by approximately 66.2%, 63.1% and 75.1%, respectively, and the RMS of the roll, pitch and yaw errors are reduced by approximately 89.5%, 92.9% and 88.5%, respectively. Furthermore, the relative position error during the GNSS outage periods is reduced to 0.26% of the travel distance for the proposed method. Therefore, the GNSS/INS/LiDAR-SLAM integrated navigation system proposed in this paper can effectively fuse the information of GNSS, IMU and LiDAR and can significantly mitigate the navigation error, especially for cases of GNSS signal attenuation or interruption.

In this paper, we proposed a multi-sensor integrated navigation system composed of GNSS (global navigation satellite system), IMU (inertial measurement unit), odometer (ODO), and LiDAR (light detection and ranging)-SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). The dead reckoning results were obtained using IMU/ODO in the front-end. The graph optimization was used to fuse the GNSS position, IMU/ODO pre-integration results, and the relative position and relative attitude from LiDAR-SLAM to obtain the final navigation results in the back-end. The odometer information is introduced in the pre-integration algorithm to mitigate the large drift rate of the IMU. The sliding window method was also adopted to avoid the increasing parameter numbers of the graph optimization. Land vehicle tests were conducted in both open-sky areas and tunnel cases. The tests showed that the proposed navigation system can effectually improve accuracy and robustness of navigation. During the navigation drift evaluation of the mimic two-minute GNSS outages, compared to the conventional GNSS/INS (inertial navigation system)/ODO integration, the root mean square (RMS) of the maximum position drift errors during outages in the proposed navigation system were reduced by 62.8%, 72.3%, and 52.1%, along the north, east, and height, respectively. Moreover, the yaw error was reduced by 62.1%. Furthermore, compared to the GNSS/IMU/LiDAR-SLAM integration navigation system, the assistance of the odometer and non-holonomic constraint reduced vertical error by 72.3%. The test in the real tunnel case shows that in weak environmental feature areas where the LiDAR-SLAM can barely work, the assistance of the odometer in the pre-integration is critical and can effectually reduce the positioning drift along the forward direction and maintain the SLAM in the short-term. Therefore, the proposed GNSS/IMU/ODO/LiDAR-SLAM integrated navigation system can effectually fuse the information from multiple sources to maintain the SLAM process and significantly mitigate navigation error, especially in harsh areas where the GNSS signal is severely degraded and environmental features are insufficient for LiDAR-SLAM.

An accurate ego-motion estimation solution is vital for autonomous vehicles. LiDAR is widely adopted in self-driving systems to obtain depth information directly and eliminate the influence of changing illumination in the environment. In LiDAR odometry, the lack of descriptions of feature points as well as the failure of the assumption of uniform motion may cause mismatches or dilution of precision in navigation. In this study, a method to perform LiDAR odometry utilizing a bird’s eye view of LiDAR data combined with a deep learning-based feature point is proposed. Orthographic projection is applied to generate a bird’s eye view image of a 3D point cloud. Thereafter, an R2D2 neural network is employed to extract keypoints and compute their descriptors. Based on those keypoints and descriptors, a two-step matching and pose estimation is designed to keep these feature points tracked over a long distance with a lower mismatch ratio compared to the conventional strategy. In the experiment, the evaluation of the proposed algorithm on the KITTI training dataset demonstrates that the proposed LiDAR odometry can provide more accurate trajectories compared with the handcrafted feature-based SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) algorithm. In detail, a comparison of the handcrafted descriptors is demonstrated. The difference between the RANSAC (Random Sample Consensus) algorithm and the two-step pose estimation is also demonstrated experimentally. In addition, the data collected by Velodyne VLP-16 is also evaluated by the proposed solution. The low-drift positioning RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) of 4.70 m from approximately 5 km mileage shown in the result indicates that the proposed algorithm has generalization performance on low-resolution LiDAR.

The fully autonomous operation of multirotor unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) in many applications requires support of precision landing. Onboard camera and fiducial marker have been widely used for this critical phase due to its low cost and high effectiveness. This paper proposes a six-degrees-of-freedom (DoF) pose estimation solution for UAV landing based on an artificial marker and a micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) inertial measurement unit (IMU). The position and orientation of the landing maker are measured in advance. The absolute position and heading of the UAV are estimated by detecting the marker and extracting corner points with the onboard monocular camera. To achieve continuous and reliable positioning when the marker is occasionally shadowed, IMU data is fused by an extended Kalman filter (EKF). The error terms of the IMU sensor are modeled and estimated. Field experiments show that the positioning accuracy of the proposed system is at centimeter level, and the heading error is less than 0.1 degrees. Comparing to the marker-based approach, the roll and pitch angle errors decreased by 33% and 54% on average. Within five seconds of vision outage, the average drifts of the horizontal and vertical position were 0.41 and 0.09 m, respectively.

Vision-based sensors such as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) are adopted in the SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) system. In the 16-beam LiDAR aided SLAM system, due to the difficulty of object detection by sparse laser data, neither the grid-based nor feature point-based solution can avoid the interference of moving objects. In an urban environment, the pole-like objects are common, invariant and have distinguishing characteristics. Therefore, it is suitable to bring more robust and reliable positioning results as auxiliary information in the process of vehicle positioning and navigation. In this work, we proposed a scheme of a SLAM system using a GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System), IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and LiDAR sensor using the position of pole-like objects as the features for SLAM. The scheme combines a traditional preprocessing method and a small scale artificial neural network to extract the pole-like objects in environment. Firstly, the threshold-based method is used to extract the pole-like object candidates from the point cloud, and then, the neural network is applied for training and inference to obtain pole-like objects. The result shows that the accuracy and recall rate are sufficient to provide stable observation for the following SLAM process. After extracting the poles from the LiDAR point cloud, their coordinates are added to the feature map, and the nonlinear optimization of the front end is carried out by utilizing the distance constraints corresponding to the pole coordinates; then, the heading angle and horizontal plane translation are estimated. The ground feature points are used to enhance the elevation, pitch and roll angle accuracy. The performance of the proposed navigation system is evaluated through field experiments by checking the position drift and attitude errors during multiple two-min mimic GNSS outages without additional IMU motion constrain such as NHC (Nonholonomic Constrain). The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed scheme is superior to that of the conventional feature point grid-based SLAM with the same back end, especially in congested crossroads where slow-moving vehicles are surrounded and pole-like objects are rich in the environment. The mean plane position error during two-min GNSS outages was reduced by 38.5%, and the root mean square error was reduced by 35.3%. Therefore, the proposed pole-like feature-based GNSS/IMU/LiDAR SLAM system can fuse condensed information from those sensors effectively to mitigate positioning and orientation errors, even in a short-time GNSS denied environment.