Graph-based Extrinsic Calibration of Multiple 2D-Lidars

2D-Lidars have been widely used in mobile robotics and autonomous vehicles for their precise measurement of distance. To effectively utilize the measurement of the sensor and perform data fusion, the extrinsic calibration between the equipped sensors is imperatively required. This paper presents a new method to obtain the relative pose of multiple 2D-Lidars automatically. Compared with existed researches which need human intervention by using artificial calibration target or synchronized sensors, our method is designed for the fully automatic calibration. Moreover, the method can also be further promoted to apply to other sensor systems. When the mobile robot is placed in the environment and automatically traverses the environment with arbitrary trajectory, the measurement data collected by 2D-Lidars at different moments and the motion estimation information are incorporated to construct the factor graph. Then a robust optimization is achieved to acquire the optimum solution. The performance of our method is validated by simulation and real-world experiment.