MetroLoc: Metro Vehicle Mapping and Localization With LiDAR-Camera-Inertial Integration

In this paper, we propose an accurate and robust multi-modal sensor fusion framework, MetroLoc, towards one of the most extreme scenarios, the large-scale metro environments. MetroLoc is built atop an IMU-centric state estimator that tightly couples light detection and ranging (LiDAR), visual, and inertial information with the convenience of loosely coupled methods. The proposed framework is composed of three submodules: IMU odometry, LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO), and Visual-inertial odometry (VIO). The IMU is treated as the primary sensor, which achieves the observations from LIO and VIO to constrain the accelerometer and gyroscope biases. Compared to previous point-only LIO methods, our approach leverages more geometry information by introducing both line and plane features into motion estimation. The VIO also utilizes the environmental structure information by employing both lines and points. Our proposed method has been tested in the long-during metro environments with a maintenance vehicle. Experimental results show the system more accurate and robust than the state-of-the-art approaches with real-time performance. The proposed method can reach 0.278% maximum drift in translation even in the highly degenerated tunnels. Besides, we develop a series of Virtual Reality (VR) applications towards efficient, economical, and interactive rail vehicle state and trackside infrastructure monitoring tasks.