Wildcat: Online Continuous-Time 3D Lidar-Inertial SLAM

[weisongwen]

We present Wildcat, a novel online 3D lidar-inertial SLAM system with exceptional versatility and robustness. At its core, Wildcat combines a robust real-time lidar-inertial odometry module, utilising a continuous-time trajectory representation, with an efficient pose-graph optimisation module that seamlessly supports both the single- and multi-agent settings. The robustness of Wildcat was recently demonstrated in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge where it outperformed other SLAM systems across various types of sensing-degraded and perceptually challenging environments. In this paper, we extensively evaluate Wildcat in a diverse set of new and publicly available real-world datasets and showcase its superior robustness and versatility over two existing state-of-the-art lidar-inertial SLAM systems.

[Pallav1299]

Hey @weisongwen. Kudos for the great work. Since you're using mechanical LIDAR, how do you handle detections due to suspended dust, fog or smoke in wild environments?

[weisongwen]

hi @Pallav1299 , this is not the paper from me. I just mark down this paper in my to read list :-)