Continuous-Time LiDAR-Inertial-Vehicle Odometry Method with Lateral Acceleration Constraint

In this paper, we propose a continuous-time-based LiDAR-inertial-vehicle odometry method, which can tightly fuse the data from Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR), inertial measurement units (IMU), and vehicle measurements. The lateral acceleration constraint is further added to trajectory estimation to make the estimated trajectory follow the motion characteristics of vehicles. In addition, since vehicle model parameters vary with different motion conditions and tyre pressure, we estimate vehicle correction factors that rectify changes in vehicle model parameters online, and also analyze the observability of these vehicle correction factors. In experiments, the proposed method is evaluated and compared with state-of-the-art methods in the public dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves more accurate results in all sequences since we add additional sensor measurements and utilize the characteristic of vehicle motion to restrict the trajectory estimation. The ablation study also proved the effectiveness of continuous-time representation, online correction factor estimation, and incorporation of lateral acceleration constraint.