LVI-SAM: Tightly-coupled Lidar-Visual-Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping

TLDR

The authors propose LVI‑SAM, a tightly‑coupled lidar‑visual‑inertial odometry framework that performs real‑time state estimation and map building with high accuracy and robustness. LVI‑SAM is built on a factor‑graph architecture comprising a visual‑inertial system and a lidar‑inertial system that share depth and pose information, enabling tightly‑coupled initialization, depth extraction, scan‑matching, loop‑closure refinement, and has been evaluated on diverse datasets with source code publicly available. The system remains operational when either sub‑system fails, thereby enhancing robustness in texture‑less and feature‑less environments.

Abstract

We propose a framework for tightly-coupled lidar-visual-inertial odometry via smoothing and mapping, LVI-SAM, that achieves real-time state estimation and map-building with high accuracy and robustness. LVI-SAM is built atop a factor graph and is composed of two sub-systems: a visual-inertial system (VIS) and a lidar-inertial system (LIS). The two sub-systems are designed in a tightly-coupled manner, in which the VIS leverages LIS estimation to facilitate initialization. The accuracy of the VIS is improved by extracting depth information for visual features using lidar measurements. In turn, the LIS utilizes VIS estimation for initial guesses to support scan-matching. Loop closures are first identified by the VIS and further refined by the LIS. LVI-SAM can also function when one of the two sub-systems fails, which increases its robustness in both texture-less and feature-less environments. LVI-SAM is extensively evaluated on datasets gathered from several platforms over a variety of scales and environments. Our implementation is available at https://git.io/lvi-sam.