LuoJia-Explorer: Unmanned Collaborative Localization and Mapping System

Over the past two decades, numerous single-robot SLAM systems have been developed and proposed. However, the problem of collaborative localization and mapping with a team of robots remains an open challenge. Collaborative localization and mapping plays a crucial role in enhancing mapping efficiency and has a wide application in search and rescue, infrastructure monitoring, extraterrestrial planetary cave exploration, etc. In this paper, we propose LuoJia-Explorer, an unmanned collaborative localization and mapping system for ground platforms. The proposed system is centralized with a main control center. Each ground platform is equipped with a multi-beam LiDAR and IMU to perform LiDAR-inertial odometry in its own coordinate system. Through mesh networking communication technology, the main control center receives the mapping result and trajectory from each platform. At the control center, global SLAM is performed, which includes loop detection, relative pose estimation and global pose graph optimization, to obtain a globally consistent mapping result. Two ground platforms were built to verify the proposed system. Field experiments have preliminarily verified the effectiveness of this system.