T-LOAM: Truncated Least Squares LiDAR-Only Odometry and Mapping in Real Time

Abstract

We propose a novel, computationally efficient, and robust light detection and ranging (LiDAR)-only odometry framework based on truncated least squares termed T-LOAM. Our method focuses on alleviating the impact of outliers to allow robust navigation in sparse, noisy, or cluttered scenarios where degeneration occurs. As preprocessing, the multiregion ground extraction and dynamic curved-voxel clustering methods are proposed to accomplish the segmentation of 3D point clouds and filter out unstable objects. A novel feature extraction module is tailored to discriminate four peculiar features: edge features, sphere features, planar features, and ground features. As frontend, a hierarchical feature-based LiDAR-only odometry performs precise motion estimates through the truncated least squares method for directly processing various features. The preprocessing model and motion estimation precision have been evaluated on the KITTI odometry benchmark as well as various campus scenarios. The experimental results have demonstrated the real-time capability and superior precision of the proposed T-LOAM over other state-of-the-art algorithms.