LGVINS: LiDAR-GPS-visual and inertial system based multi-sensor fusion for smooth and reliable UAV state estimation

With the development of Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’s (UAV’s), Precise state estimation is a fundamental aspect of autonomous flight and plays a critical role in enabling robots specially in GPS denied environment to operate safely, reliably, and effectively across a wide range of applications and operational scenarios. In this paper, we propose a tightly-coupled multi-sensor filtering framework for robust UAV/UGV state estimation, which integrates data from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), a stereo camera, GPS, and 3D range measurements from two Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors. The proposed LGVINS system significantly improves the accuracy and robustness of state estimation in both structured and unstructured outdoor environments, such as bridge inspections, open fields, urban city and areas near buildings. It also improves positioning accuracy in scenarios with or without GPS signals. The goal is to exploit the fact that these sensor modalities have mutually exclusive strengths, the visual, inertial and the Lidar sensor techniques are implemented to compensate for the robots state estimate errors in multiple outdoor challenging environment. It effectively reduces long-term trajectory drift and ensures smooth, continuous state estimation, regardless of GPS satellite availability. We demonstrate and evaluate the LGVINS approach on public dataset as well as our own dataset collected from the proposed hardware integration on UAV, deployed on computationally-constrained systems. This demonstrates that the proposed system achieves higher accuracy and robustness in state estimation across various environments compared to currently available methods.