PaGO-LOAM: Robust Ground-Optimized LiDAR Odometry

Numerous researchers have conducted studies to achieve fast and robust ground-optimized LiDAR odometry methods for terrestrial mobile platforms. In particular, ground-optimized LiDAR odometry usually employs ground segmentation as a preprocessing method. This is because most of the points in a 3D point cloud captured by a 3D LiDAR sensor on a terrestrial platform are from the ground. However, the effect of the performance of ground segmentation on LiDAR odometry is still not closely examined. In this paper, a robust ground-optimized LiDAR odometry framework is proposed to facilitate the study to check the effect of ground segmentation on LiDAR SLAM based on the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method. By using our proposed odometry framework, it is easy and straightforward to test whether ground segmentation algorithms help extract well-described features and thus improve SLAM performance. In addition, by leveraging the SOTA ground segmentation method called Patchwork, which shows robust ground segmentation even in complex and uneven urban environments with little performance perturbation, a novel ground-optimized LiDAR odometry is proposed, called PaGO-LOAM. The methods were tested using the KITTI odometry dataset. PaGO-LOAM shows robust and accurate performance compared with the baseline method. Our code is available at https://github.com/url-kaist/AlterGround-LeGO-LOAM

Automated summary

This paper proposes a ground-optimized LiDAR odometry method and examines the impact of ground segmentation on LiDAR SLAM performance. The proposed odometry framework allows easy testing of the effectiveness of ground segmentation algorithms in feature extraction and SLAM performance. The results show the importance of ground segmentation in improving LiDAR SLAM performance.