Lidar Positioning for Indoor Precision Navigation

Max Holmberg, Oskar Karlsson, Michael Tulldahl; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2022, pp. 359-368

Lidar based simultaneous localization and mapping methods can be adapted for deployment on small autonomous vehicles operating in unmapped indoor environments. For this purpose, we propose a method which combines inertial data, low-drift lidar odometry, planar primitives, and loop closing in a graph-based structure. The accuracy of our method is experimentally evaluated, using a high-resolution lidar, and compared to the state-of-the-art methods LIO-SAM and Cartographer. We specifically address the lateral positioning accuracy when passing through narrow openings, where high accuracy is a prerequisite for safe operation of autonomous vehicles. The test cases include doorways, slightly wider reference passages, and a larger corridor environment. We observe a reduced lateral accuracy for all three methods when passing through the narrow openings compared to operation in larger spaces. Compared to state-of-the-art, our method shows better results in the narrow passages, and comparable results in the other environments with reasonably low usage of CPU and memory resources.