Comparative Analysis of 3D LiDAR Scan-Matching Methods for State Estimation of Autonomous Surface Vessel

Accurate positioning and state estimation of surface vessels are prerequisites to achieving autonomous navigation. Recently, the rapid development of 3D LiDARs has promoted the autonomy of both land and aerial vehicles, which has aroused the interest of researchers in the maritime community accordingly. In this paper, the state estimation schemes based on 3D LiDAR scan matching are explored in depth. Firstly, the iterative closest point (ICP) and normal distribution transformation (NDT) algorithms and their variants are introduced in detail. Besides, ten representative registration algorithms are selected from the variants for comparative analysis. Two types of experiments are designed by utilizing the field test data of an ASV equipped with a 3D LiDAR. Both the accuracy and real-time performance of the selected algorithms are systemically analyzed based on the experimental results. It follows that ICP and Levenberg-Marquardt iterative closest point (LMICP) methods perform well on single-frame experiments, while the voxelized generalized iterative closest point (FastVGICP) and multi-threaded optimization generalized iterative closest point (FastGICP) methods have the best performance on continuous-frame experiments. However, all methods have lower accuracy during fast turning. Consequently, the limitations of current methods are discussed in detail, which provides insights for future exploration of accurate state estimation based on 3D LiDAR for ASVs.