3D LiDAR SLAM: A survey

Abstract Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a very challenging yet fundamental problem in the field of robotics and photogrammetry, and it is also a prerequisite for intelligent perception of unmanned systems. In recent years, 3D LiDAR SLAM technology has made remarkable progress. However, to the best of our knowledge, almost all existing surveys focus on visual SLAM methods. To bridge the gap, this paper provides a comprehensive review that summarizes the scientific connotation, key difficulties, research status, and future trends of 3D LiDAR SLAM, aiming to give readers a better understanding of LiDAR SLAM technology, thereby inspiring future research. Specifically, it summarizes the contents and characteristics of the main steps of LiDAR SLAM, introduces the key difficulties it faces, and gives the relationship with existing reviews; it provides an overview of current research hotspots, including LiDAR‐only methods and multi‐sensor fusion methods, and gives milestone algorithms and open‐source tools in each category; it summarizes common datasets, evaluation metrics and representative commercial SLAM solutions, and provides the evaluation results of mainstream methods on public datasets; it looks forward to the development trend of LiDAR SLAM, and considers the preliminary ideas of multi‐modal SLAM, event SLAM, and quantum SLAM.