English

ROLL: Long-Term Robust LiDAR-based Localization With Temporary Mapping in Changing Environments

Robotics 2022-03-09 v1

Abstract

Long-term scene changes present challenges to localization systems using a pre-built map. This paper presents a LiDAR-based system that can provide robust localization against those challenges. Our method starts with activation of a mapping process temporarily when global matching towards the pre-built map is unreliable. The temporary map will be merged onto the pre-built map for later localization runs once reliable matching is obtained again. We further integrate a LiDAR inertial odometry (LIO) to provide motion-compensated LiDAR scans and a reliable initial pose guess for the global matching module. To generate a smooth real-time trajectory for navigation purposes, we fuse poses from odometry and global matching by solving a pose graph optimization problem. We evaluate our localization system with extensive experiments on the NCLT dataset including a variety of changing indoor and outdoor environments, and the results demonstrate a robust and accurate localization performance for over a year. The implementations are open sourced on GitHub.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.03923,
  title  = {ROLL: Long-Term Robust LiDAR-based Localization With Temporary Mapping in Changing Environments},
  author = {Bin Peng and Hongle Xie and Weidong Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.03923},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:05:40.231Z