A robust data-model dual-driven fusion with uncertainty estimation for LiDAR–IMU localization system

Abstract

Accurate and robust localization is a critical requirement for autonomous driving and intelligent robots, particularly in complex dynamic environments and various motion scenarios. However, existing LiDAR odometry methods often struggle to promptly respond to changes in the surroundings and motion conditions with fixed parameters through execution, hindering their ability to adaptively adjust system model parameters. Additionally, current localization techniques frequently overlook the confidence level associated with their pose results, leading the autonomous systems to unconditionally accept estimated outputs, even when they may be erroneous. In this paper, we propose a robust data-model dual-driven fusion with uncertainty estimation for the LiDAR–IMU localization system, which integrates the advantages of data-driven and model-driven approaches. We introduce data-driven feature encoder modules for LiDAR and IMU raw data, enabling the system to detect changes in the environment and motion status. Subsequently, these data-driven findings are incorporated into a filtering based model, allowing for the adaptive refinement of system model parameters. Furthermore, we refine the representation of uncertainty based on the Extended-Kalman-Filter model covariance, integrating uncertainty from sensor data and model parameters, which helps to evaluate the confidence of fusion system results. We conducted extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets and one dataset we collected with three sequences, verifying the accuracy of our method. In addition, we have demonstrated the robustness of our method in different motion states and scenarios through comparative experiments, as well as the effectiveness of our refined uncertainty estimation, compared with existing great methods, such as Fast-LIO2 and LIO-SAM, the localization accuracy has been improved by 8.3%.