CAVERS: Multimodal SLAM Data from a Natural Karstic Cave with Ground Truth Motion Capture

Abstract:Autonomous robots operating in natural karstic caves face perception and navigation challenges that are qualitatively distinct from those encountered in mines or tunnels: irregular geometry, reflective wet surfaces, near-zero ambient light, and complex branching passages. Yet publicly available datasets targeting this environment remain scarce and offer limited sensing modalities and environmental diversity. We present CAVERS, a multimodal dataset acquired in two structurally distinct rooms of Cueva de la Victoria, Málaga, Spain, containing 24 sequences with approximately 335 GB of recorded data. The sensor suite combines an Intel RealSense D435i RGB-D-I camera, an Optris PI640i near-IR thermal camera, and a Velodyne VLP-16 LiDAR, operated both handheld and mounted on a wheeled rover under full darkness and artificial illumination. For most of the sequences, mm-accurate 6-DoF ground truth pose and velocity at 120 Hz are provided by an Optitrack motion capture system installed directly inside the cave. We benchmark seven state-of-the-art SLAM and odometry algorithms spanning visual, visual-inertial, thermal-inertial, and LiDAR-based pipelines, as well as a 3D reconstruction pipeline, demonstrating the dataset's usability. The dataset and all supplementary material are publicly available at: this https URL.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2604.15052 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2604.15052v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.15052 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2026.3726391 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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