Extending Ground-Constraint LiDAR-IMU Calibration to Tilted Surfaces in a Continuous-Time Framework

Abstract:This paper presents a novel method that extends targetless LiDAR-IMU calibration for ground vehicles to non- flat environments. Calibration typically necessitates full exci- tation of the sensor rig, a requirement that is not fulfilled by ground vehicles in normal operation. To address the degenerate planar motion, state-of-the-art methods propose residuals that assume the colinearity of the gravity and physical surface normal vectors, restricting usage to cases where the ground is assumed flat. This paper proposes ground-plane residuals that do not require this assumption, and are applicable for planar motion on a tilted surface. Results are demonstrated on a dataset collected from a Husky ground vehicle, on the M2DGR dataset, as well as on an offroad vehicle dataset. Repeatability is shown to be improved both in tilted and flat-ground scenarios, with strong improvement demonstrated for the tilted case. The implementation and experiments are open-sourced at this https URL.

8 pages, 13 figures. Submitted to Robotics & Automation Letters

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2608.25135 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.25135v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.25135 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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