New LiDAR Based SLAM Systems for Real-Time Campus Tour Robot Navigation

$LiDAR$
based SLAM systems are often used because of their high precision and accuracy in 3D environments. LiDAR emits lasers to create detailed point clouds of the environment which helps the robot localize within the environment precisely. It is independent of the ambient light and weather conditions which makes it a perfect choice over visual based SLAM systems. We introduce a challenging campus tour robot navigation dataset that encompasses complex indoor and outdoor scenarios. Data was collected using custom sensor setup on two mobile robots SPOT and Husky. We propose and compare two state-of-the-art real-time LiDAR inertial odometry based SLAM system and only LiDAR based odometry system with the goal to deploy the system on the SPOT and Husky robots for the novel application of giving tours around CSUN university campus via a mobile robot. Experiment results prove that computationally the LiDAR based system took less time than the LiDAR inertial based system, but the LiDAR inertial system was more accurate in terms of the state estimation of the robot.