Chain-SLAM: Globally Consistent Backend for Multi-Session LiDAR SLAM via Chained Loop Closure

Abstract:Maintaining consistency over long spatial and temporal horizons remains a fundamental challenge in large-scale LiDAR SLAM, particularly when integrating maps collected across multiple sessions. We present Chain-SLAM, a LiDAR SLAM backend enabling online multi-session map alignment and reuse with global consistency at large scale. We implement a chained loop closure mechanism that efficiently propagates geometric constraints across inter-session keyframes through an adjacency graph, enabling robust long-horizon consistency triggered by reliable short-horizon loop closures. The system initializes inter-session alignment with GNSS-proximity place recognition, then performs on-the-fly loop closure detections and joint optimization of loaded maps and newly acquired trajectories within a unified factor graph, maintaining both inter- and intra-session geometric consistency without dynamic object removal, and cross-platform robustness with minimal hyperparameter tuning. Experimental results show improved trajectory accuracy and robust multi-session integration on large-scale datasets. We release our source code to support reproducible research in large-scale multi-session LiDAR SLAM. Project site: this https URL

Accepted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2026. 8 pages, 6 figures

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.12221 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.12221v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.12221 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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