A Point-to-distribution Degeneracy Detection Factor for LiDAR SLAM using Local Geometric Models

Limited by the working principles, LiDAR-SLAM systems suffer from the degeneration phenomenon in environments such as long corridors and tunnels, due to the lack of sufficient geometric features for frame-to-frame matching. The accuracy and sensitivity of existing degeneracy detection methods need to be further improved. In this paper, we propose a novel method for degeneracy detection using local geometric models based on point-to-distribution matching. To obtain an accurate description of local geometric models, an adaptive adjustment of voxel segmentation according to the point cloud distribution and density is designed. The codes of the proposed method is open-source and available at https://github.com/jisehua/Degenerate-Detection.git. Experiments with public datasets and self-build robots were conducted to evaluate the methods. The results exhibit that our proposed method achieves higher accuracy than the other existing approaches. Applying our proposed method is beneficial for improving the robustness of the LiDAR-SLAM systems.