Automatic Calibration of Multiple 3D LiDARs in Urban Environments

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 method without any calibration target, prior environment information, and manual initialization. Our approach starts with a hand-eye calibration by aligning the motion of each sensor. The initial results are then refined by an appearance-based method by minimizing a cost function constructed by point-plane distance. Experimental results on simulated and real-world data 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.