Pose Estimation Based on Bidirectional Visual–Inertial Odometry with 3D LiDAR (BV-LIO)

Due to the limitation of a single sensor such as only camera or only LiDAR, the Visual SLAM detects few effective features in the case of poor lighting or no texture. The LiDAR SLAM will also degrade in an unstructured environment and open spaces, which reduces the accuracy of pose estimation and the quality of mapping. In order to solve this problem, on account of the high efficiency of Visual odometry and the high accuracy of LiDAR odometry, this paper investigates the multi-sensor fusion of bidirectional visual–inertial odometry with 3D LiDAR for pose estimation. This method can couple the IMU with the bidirectional vision respectively, and the LiDAR odometry is obtained assisted by the bidirectional visual inertial. The factor graph optimization is constructed, which effectively improves the accuracy of pose estimation. The algorithm in this paper is compared with LIO-LOAM, LeGO-LOAM, VINS-Mono, and so on using challenging datasets such as KITTI and M2DGR. The results show that this method effectively improves the accuracy of pose estimation and has high application value for mobile robots.