LiDAR-based robust localization for field autonomous vehicles in off-road environments

Robust localization is an essential capability for autonomous land vehicles. While a lot of work focused on structured environments, this article focuses on navigation in off-road environments. In the off-road environment, due to the lack of salient features, scan matching algorithms tend to degenerate. Therefore, the first contribution of this paper is to propose a reliable degeneracy indicator which can evaluate the scan matching performance. The evaluated degeneracy indicator is then integrated into the factor graph optimization framework which is used in both the offline mapping system and the online localization system. Moreover, a complete navigation system that can handle the incomplete and partly outdated LiDAR maps is developed. Extensive tests on real-world data sets show that the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, especially in degenerate scenarios.