LOAM-Livox

A robust LiDAR Odometry and Mapping (LOAM) package for Livox-LiDAR

Loam-Livox is a robust, low drift, and real time odometry and mapping package for Livox LiDARs, significant low cost and high performance LiDARs that are designed for massive industrials uses. Our package address many key issues: feature extraction and selection in a very limited FOV, robust outliers rejection, moving objects filtering, and motion distortion compensation. In addition, we also integrate other features like parallelable pipeline, point cloud management using cells and maps, loop closure, utilities for maps saving and reload, etc. To know more about the details, please refer to our related paper:)

In the development of our package, we reference to LOAM, LOAM_NOTED, and A-LOAM.

Developer: Jiarong Lin

Our related paper: our related papers are now available on arxiv:

1. Loam_livox: A fast, robust, high-precision LiDAR odometry and mapping package for LiDARs of small FoV
2. A fast, complete, point cloud based loop closure for LiDAR odometry and mapping

Our related video: our related videos are now available on YouTube (click below images to open):

1. Prerequisites

1.1 Ubuntu and ROS

Ubuntu 64-bit 16.04 or 18.04. ROS Kinetic or Melodic. ROS Installation and its additional ROS pacakge:

    sudo apt-get install ros-XXX-cv-bridge ros-XXX-tf ros-XXX-message-filters ros-XXX-image-transport

NOTICE: remember to replace “XXX” on above command as your ROS distributions, for example, if your use ROS-kinetic, the command should be:

    sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-cv-bridge ros-kinetic-tf ros-kinetic-message-filters ros-kinetic-image-transport

1.2. Ceres Solver

Follow Ceres Installation.

1.3. PCL

Follow PCL Installation.

NOTICE: Recently, we find that the point cloud output form the voxelgrid filter vary form PCL 1.7 and 1.9, and PCL 1.7 leads some failure in some of our examples (issue #28). By this, we strongly recommand you to use update your PCL as version 1.9 if you are using the lower version.

2. Build

Clone the repository and catkin_make:

    cd ~/catkin_ws/src
    git clone https://github.com/hku-mars/loam_livox.git
    cd ../
    catkin_make
    source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

3. Directly run

Connect to your PC to Livox LiDAR (mid-40) by following Livox-ros-driver installation, then

    roslaunch loam_livox livox.launch

4. Rosbag Example

4.1. Common rosbag

Download Our recorded rosbag and then

roslaunch loam_livox rosbag.launch
rosbag play YOUR_DOWNLOADED.bag

4.1. Large-scale rosbag

For large scale rosbag (For example HKUST_01.bag ), we recommand you launch with bigger line and plane resolution (using rosbag_largescale.launch)

roslaunch loam_livox rosbag_largescale.launch
rosbag play YOUR_DOWNLOADED.bag

5. Rosbag Example with loop closure enabled

5.1. Loop closure demostration

We provide a rosbag file of small size (named “loop_loop_hku_zym.bag”, Download here) for demostration:

roslaunch loam_livox rosbag_loop_simple.launch
rosbag play YOUR_PATH/loop_simple.bag

5.2. Other examples

For other example (loop_loop_hku_zym.bag, loop_hku_main.bag), launch with:

roslaunch loam_livox rosbag_loop.launch
rosbag play YOUR_DOWNLOADED.bag

NOTICE: The only difference between launch files “rosbag_loop_simple.launch” and “rosbag_loop.launch” is the minimum number of keyframes (minimum_keyframe_differen) between two candidate frames of loop detection.

6. Our 3D-printable handheld device

To get our following handheld device, please go to another one of our open source reposity, all of the 3D parts are all designed of FDM printable. We also release our solidwork files so that you can freely make your own adjustments.

7.Acknowledgments

Thanks for LOAM(J. Zhang and S. Singh. LOAM: Lidar Odometry and Mapping in Real-time) LOAM, LOAM_NOTED, and A-LOAM.

8. License

The source code is released under GPLv2 license.

We are still working on improving the performance and reliability of our codes. For any technical issues, please contact me via email Jiarong Lin < ziv.lin.ljr@gmail.com >.

For commercial use, please contact Dr. Fu Zhang < fuzhang@hku.hk >