English

FUSE: A Framework for Unified State Estimation in Vehicular and Robotic SLAM Systems

Robotics 2026-05-22 v3

Abstract

Tightly coupled SLAM formulations under mixed-rate sensing often bind temporal processing, local geometric association, estimator formulation, and map-update policy into method-specific designs. Such binding makes it difficult to vary one design choice without re-engineering the rest of the state-estimation process. This paper presents FUSE, a framework for unified state estimation in vehicular and robotic SLAM systems. FUSE organizes the state-estimation interface around observation ingestion, propagation, update, and state query, and uses this interface to separate temporal processing, residual-ready local geometric association, estimator formulation, and map-update policy. A LiDAR--IMU instantiation is developed to examine the framework under mixed-rate sensing and directional degeneracy, where high-rate inertial propagation, LiDAR-triggered geometric update, residual screening, and degeneracy-aware correction operate through the same interface boundaries. On a 418~m loop-corridor sequence, the instantiation reports a 1.626 m end-to-end trajectory error, corresponding to a 7.9% relative error reduction compared with Faster-LIO, the lowest-error baseline on this sequence. The results support FUSE as a framework for organizing state-estimation design choices and show how the evaluated instantiation regularizes updates along weakly observable directions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.18047,
  title  = {FUSE: A Framework for Unified State Estimation in Vehicular and Robotic SLAM Systems},
  author = {Wei Wu and Honglin Chen and Wenhan Cao and Yao Lyu and Shaobing Xu and Kun Jiang and Jiangtao Li and Tao Zhang and Lei Guo and Shengbo Eben Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.18047},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:18:30.155Z