Research on Digital Terrain Construction Based on IMU and LiDAR Fusion Perception

To address the shortcomings of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors in extracting road surface elevation information in front of a vehicle, a scheme for digital terrain construction based on the fusion of an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and LiDAR perception is proposed. First, two sets of sensor coordinate systems were configured, and the parameters of LiDAR and IMU were calibrated. Then, a terrain construction system based on the fusion perception of IMU and LiDAR was established, and improvements were made to the state estimation and mapping architecture. Terrain construction experiments were conducted in an academic setting. Finally, based on the output information from the terrain construction system, a moving average-like algorithm was designed to process point cloud data and extract the road surface elevation information at the vehicle's trajectory position. By comparing the extraction effects of four different sliding window widths, the 4 cm width sliding window, which yielded the best results, was ultimately selected, making the extracted road surface elevation information more accurate and effective.