CTA-LO: Accurate and Robust LiDAR Odometry Using Continuous-Time Adaptive Estimation

Accurate and robust LiDAR odometry is a crucial technology for robot localization. However, motion distortion and ranging error make it a bottleneck. Most existing methods are limited in accuracy and robustness because they simply compensate for motion distortion by constant velocity motion assumption without accurate model of ranging error. In this paper, we propose a high-precision and robust LiDAR odometry (LO), which utilizes continuous-time estimation to remove LiDAR distortion and builds the spot uncertainty model to quantify the ranging error. Generally, the number of variables in continuous-time estimation is several times higher than that in discrete-time ones, leading to insufficient constraints on the LiDAR odometry. To solve this problem, we propose a marginalization method to retain prior scans’ constraints by exploiting the local support property of the B-spline. To further improve the odometry accuracy, we propose a residual adaptive weighting method and a probabilistic point cloud map based on the spot uncertainty model of LiDAR points. The experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art LiDAR odometry in accuracy and robustness.