Longitudinal Velocity Estimation of Driverless Vehicle by Fusing LiDAR and Inertial Measurement Unit

Aiming at the problem that, under certain extreme conditions, relying on tire force or tire angular velocity to represent the longitudinal velocity of the unmanned vehicle will fail, this paper proposes a longitudinal velocity estimation method that fuses LiDAR and inertial measurement unit (IMU). First, in order to improve the accuracy of LiDAR odometry, IMU information is introduced in the process of eliminating point cloud motion distortion. Then, the statistical characteristic of the system noise is tracked by an adaptive noise estimator, which reduces the model error and suppresses the filtering divergence, thereby improving the robustness and filtering accuracy of the algorithm. Next, in order to further improve the estimation accuracy of longitudinal velocity, time-series analysis is used to predict longitudinal acceleration, which improves the accuracy of the prediction step in the unscented Kalman filter (UKF). Finally, the feasibility of the estimation method is verified by simulation experiments and real-vehicle experiments. In the simulation experiments, medium- and high-velocity conditions are tested. In high-velocity conditions (0-30 m/s), the average error is 1.573 m/s; in the experiment, the average error is 0.113 m/s.