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arXiv · 2608.25135

Extending Ground-Constraint LiDAR-IMU Calibration to Tilted Surfaces in a Continuous-Time Framework

Vassili Korotkine·Pierre Chamoun·Mohammed Ayman Shalaby·James Richard Forbes
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Abstract

This paper presents a novel method that extends targetless LiDAR-IMU calibration for ground vehicles to non- flat environments. Calibration typically necessitates full exci- tation of the sensor rig, a requirement that is not fulfilled by ground vehicles in normal operation. To address the degenerate planar motion, state-of-the-art methods propose residuals that assume the colinearity of the gravity and physical surface normal vectors, restricting usage to cases where the ground is assumed flat. This paper proposes ground-plane residuals that do not require this assumption, and are applicable for planar motion on a tilted surface. Results are demonstrated on a dataset collected from a Husky ground vehicle, on the M2DGR dataset, as well as on an offroad vehicle dataset. Repeatability is shown to be improved both in tilted and flat-ground scenarios, with strong improvement demonstrated for the tilted case. The implementation and experiments are open-sourced at https://github.com/vkorotkine/licalib_tilted_ground.

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Vassili Korotkine, Pierre Chamoun, Mohammed Ayman Shalaby, James Richard Forbes. 2026-08-25. Extending Ground-Constraint LiDAR-IMU Calibration to Tilted Surfaces in a Continuous-Time Framework. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25135

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