GLIO2: A GPU-Parallelized Tightly-Coupled LiDAR-Inertial-GNSS System for Robust and Real-Time Global Localization and Mapping

Abstract:Globally consistent, real-time state estimation in large-scale, perceptually degraded environments is essential for autonomous vehicles and aerial robots, and requires fusing LiDAR, inertial, and GNSS measurements. Existing fusion methods, however, share a scan-to-map front-end with two failure modes. First, each scan is aligned to an incrementally built map that drifts under degeneracy, and once the estimate diverges the error is irrecoverable. Second, even without divergence, a registration biased by dynamic objects or wrong correspondences is propagated as a single pose constraint with an over-confident covariance, leaving its correspondences unavailable for GNSS to re-weight or relinearize. We propose GLIO2, a tightly-coupled LiDAR-Inertial-GNSS system whose GPU-parallel front-end jointly optimizes scan-to-multiscan LiDAR, IMU pre-integration, and raw GNSS measurements in a single sliding-window factor graph, sustaining real-time operation on edge hardware. A complementary offline back-end reuses the same cached factors to refine the entire trajectory in batch, completing the 30-min, 4.51-km UrbanNav Whampoa sequence in about 24 s. Across three public benchmarks (UrbanNav, MARS-LVIG, M3DGR) and self-collected UAV and vehicle data, GLIO2 attains the best overall accuracy among evaluated systems. On a 5.66-km bridge traversed at up to 96 km/h, where every competing baseline diverges under LiDAR degeneracy, it maintains 1.6 m horizontal accuracy. On an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX, the full pipeline runs at about 25 Hz (39.60 ms per scan). The source code and datasets will be released.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.12411 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.12411v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.12411 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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