CertainOdom: Uncertainty Weighted Multi-task Learning Model for LiDAR Odometry Estimation

Abstract

As a basic and indispensable module, LiDAR odom-etry estimation is widely used in robotics. In recent years, learning-based modeling approaches for odometry estimation have been validated to be feasible. However, it is necessary to consider security factors as the highest priorities when we apply the learning-based model to certain high-risk real-world scenarios, such as autonomous driving. The odometry uncertainty estimation provides more valuable information for downstream tasks, such as route planning and navigation. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural network (namely CertainOdom) to solve odometry and uncertainty estimation tasks by applying multi-task learning. Instead of using the manually-tuned hyper-parameters, we employ the learnable uncertainties to weigh the balance between the error of translation and orientation in the loss function. We evaluate the estimated trajectory and uncertainty on KITTI dataset. We also compare the robustness against the traditional geometry-based methods on our artificially degraded KITTI LiDAR dataset. Extensive experimental results show that our model with uncertainty weighted loss achieves competitive performance in LiDAR odometry estimation. We also explain our uncertainties qualitatively and quantitatively.