MULLS: Versatile LiDAR SLAM via Multi-metric Linear Least Square

Abstract

The rapid development of autonomous driving and mobile mapping calls for off-the-shelf LiDAR SLAM solutions that are adaptive to LiDARs of different specifications on various complex scenarios. To this end, we propose MULLS, an efficient, low-drift, and versatile 3D LiDAR SLAM system. For the front-end, roughly classified feature points (ground, facade, pillar, beam, etc.) are extracted from each frame using dual-threshold ground filtering and principal components analysis. Then the registration between the current frame and the local submap is accomplished efficiently by the proposed multi-metric linear least square iterative closest point algorithm. Point-to-point (plane, line) error metrics within each point class are jointly optimized with a linear approximation to estimate the ego-motion. Static feature points of the registered frame are appended into the local map to keep it updated. For the back-end, hierarchical pose graph optimization is conducted among regularly stored history submaps to reduce the drift resulting from dead reckoning. Extensive experiments are carried out on three datasets with more than 100,000 frames collected by six types of LiDAR on various outdoor and indoor scenarios. On the KITTI benchmark, MULLS ranks among the top LiDAR-only SLAM systems with real-time performance.

Publication
In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Xi’an, China, pp.1-8, 2020.

Teaser

MULLS Pipeline of the multi-metric linear least square ICP

Demo video

KITTI results
kitti_00_show

kitti_01_show

Reference

If you find this project is useful, you may cite it as:

@inproceedings{Pan2021ICRA,
  title={{MULLS: Versatile LiDAR SLAM via Multi-metric Linear Least Square}},
  author={Pan, Yue and Xiao, Pengchuan and He, Yujie and Shao, Zhenlei and Li, Zesong},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year={2021},
  pages={1-8}
}