Automatic Calibration of Multiple 3D LiDARs in Urban Environments

Jianhao Jiao1, Yang Yu1, Qinghai Liao1, Haoyang Ye2, Rui Fan3, Ming Liu4

  • 1Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
  • 2Huawei Technologies
  • 3Tongji University
  • 4Hkust

Details

11:30 - 11:45 | Tue 5 Nov | L1-R1 | TuAT1.3

Session: Calibration and Identification

Abstract

Multiple LiDARs have progressively emerged on autonomous vehicles for rendering a rich view and dense measurements. However, the lack of precise calibration negatively affects their potential applications. In this paper, we propose a novel system that enables automatic multi-LiDAR calibration without any calibration target, prior environment information, and initial values of the extrinsic parameters. Our approach starts with a hand-eye calibration for automatic initialization by aligning the motions of each sensor. The initial results are then refined with an appearance-based method by minimizing a cost function constructed by point-plane distance. Experimental results on simulated and real-world data sets demonstrate the reliability and accuracy of our calibration approach. The proposed approach can calibrate a multi-LiDAR system with the rotation and translation errors less than 0.04rad and 0.1m respectively for a mobile platform.