We present Wildcat, a novel online 3D lidar-inertial SLAM system with exceptional versatility and robustness. At its core, Wildcat combines a robust real-time lidar-inertial odometry module, utilising a continuous-time trajectory representation, with an efficient pose-graph optimisation module that seamlessly supports both the single- and multi-agent settings. The robustness of Wildcat was recently demonstrated in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge where it outperformed other SLAM systems across various types of sensing-degraded and perceptually challenging environments. In this paper, we extensively evaluate Wildcat in a diverse set of new and publicly available real-world datasets and showcase its superior robustness and versatility over two existing state-of-the-art lidar-inertial SLAM systems.
@article{arxiv.2205.12595,
title = {Wildcat: Online Continuous-Time 3D Lidar-Inertial SLAM},
author = {Milad Ramezani and Kasra Khosoussi and Gavin Catt and Peyman Moghadam and Jason Williams and Paulo Borges and Fred Pauling and Navinda Kottege},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.12595},
year = {2022}
}