ethz-asl/lidar_align

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1054 stars · 282 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A ROS-based C++ tool that estimates the extrinsic transformation between a 3D lidar and a 6-DOF pose sensor. It works by fusing lidar pointclouds using candidate transforms and optimizing so the combined pointcloud is maximally 'crisp' (minimal nearest-neighbor distances).

Use cases

• calibrate extrinsic transform between 3D lidar and pose sensor
• find lidar to IMU/odometry extrinsics from a rosbag
• estimate sensor-to-lidar rotation and translation offline
• calibrate lidar mounted on a drone or handheld rig with non-planar motion
• produce transformation matrix for SLAM or mapping pipelines

When to choose

• you have a 3D lidar and a 6-DOF pose source (VIO, motion capture, odometry) with recorded data
• your sensor setup can perform highly non-planar motions
• you want a simple, mostly parameter-free ROS-based calibration tool

When to avoid

• calibrating sensors on cars or other platforms with mostly planar motion
• you need online/real-time calibration rather than offline batch estimation
• you are not using ROS or cannot provide PointCloud2 and pose data

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

robotics simulation math developer-tools robotics autonomous-vehicles computer-vision cpp lidar-calibration extrinsic-calibration ros pointcloud sensor-fusion pose-sensor optimization nlopt algorithms linux

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For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="ethz-asl/lidar_align")