A LiDAR SLAM-Assisted Fusion Positioning Method for USVs

Confronted with unmanned surface vessel (USV) operations where GNSS signals are unavailable due to obscuration and other factors, a LiDAR SLAM-assisted fusion positioning method for USVs is proposed to combine GNSS/INS positioning with LiDAR-SLAM. When the USV works in wide-open water, the carrier phase differential GNSS/INS loosely coupled integration strategy is applied to fuse and calibrate the positioning data, and the positioning information of the USV is obtained through the coordinate conversion process. The system uses a dynamic switching strategy to enter to LiDAR-SLAM positioning when GNSS signals are not available, compensating the LiDAR data with precise angle information to ensure accurate and stable positioning. The experiments show that compared with the traditional Kalman filter and adaptive Kalman filter fusion algorithms, the positioning error is reduced by 55.4% and 43.5%. The velocity error is also limited by 78.2% and 57.9%. The standard deviation and the root mean square error are stable within 0.1 m, indicating that our method has better data stability, while the probability of positioning anomaly is effectively controlled.