A Light-Weight LiDAR-Inertial SLAM System with Loop Closing

Abstract: In this work, we propose a lightweight integrated LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system with high efficiency and a great loop closure capacity. We found that the current State-of-the-art LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system has poor performance in loop closure. The LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system often fails with the large drifting and suffers from limited efficiency when faced with large-scale circumstances. In this work, firstly, to improve the speed of the whole LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system, we have proposed a new data structure of the sparse voxel-hashing to enhance the efficiency of the LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system. Secondly, to improve the point cloud-based localization performance, we have integrated the loop closure algorithms to improve the localization performance. Extensive experiments on the real-scene large-scale complicated circumstances demonstrate the great effectiveness and robustness of the proposed LiDAR-Inertial SLAM system.