LiDAR-Inertial SLAM with Efficiently Extracted Planes

This paper proposes a LiDAR-Inertial SLAM with efficiently extracted planes, which couples explicit planes in the odometry to improve accuracy and in the mapping for consistency. The proposed method consists of three parts: an efficient Point
$\boldsymbol{\rightarrow\text{Line}\rightarrow \text{Plane}}$
extraction algorithm, a LiDAR-Inertial-Plane tightly coupled odometry, and a global plane-aided mapping. Specifically, we leverage the ring field of the LiDAR point cloud to accelerate the region-growing-based plane extraction algorithm. Then we tightly coupled IMU pre-integration factors, LiDAR odometry factors, and explicit plane factors in the sliding window to obtain a more accurate initial pose for mapping. Finally, we maintain explicit planes in the global map, and enhance system consistency by optimizing the factor graph of optimized odometry factors and plane observation factors. Experimental results show that our plane extraction method is efficient, and the proposed plane-aided LiDAR-Inertial SLAM significantly improves the accuracy and consistency compared to the other state-of-the-art algorithms with only a small increase in time consumption.