FAST-LIO: A Fast, Robust LiDAR-inertial Odometry Package by Tightly-Coupled Iterated Kalman Filter

TL;DR

This paper introduces FAST-LIO, a real-time, robust LiDAR-inertial odometry system that efficiently fuses sensor data using a novel Kalman filter formulation, suitable for fast and noisy environments.

Contribution

It proposes a computationally efficient Kalman gain calculation method and demonstrates real-time performance with over 1,200 features on a quadrotor.

Findings

Reliable real-time navigation in various environments

Fuses over 1,200 features within 25 ms per iteration

Open-source implementation available

Abstract

This paper presents a computationally efficient and robust LiDAR-inertial odometry framework. We fuse LiDAR feature points with IMU data using a tightly-coupled iterated extended Kalman filter to allow robust navigation in fast-motion, noisy or cluttered environments where degeneration occurs. To lower the computation load in the presence of large number of measurements, we present a new formula to compute the Kalman gain. The new formula has computation load depending on the state dimension instead of the measurement dimension. The proposed method and its implementation are tested in various indoor and outdoor environments. In all tests, our method produces reliable navigation results in real-time: running on a quadrotor onboard computer, it fuses more than 1,200 effective feature points in a scan and completes all iterations of an iEKF step within 25 ms. Our codes are open-sourced on Github.