mola_lidar_odometry

LIDAR odometry component based on the MOLA and MRPT frameworks, compatible with ROS 2.

Contents

This repository provides a C++ library mola_lidar_odometry implementing LIDAR odometry. Sensor input is provided via MOLA components, and ROS 2 example launch files are provided in ros2-launchs.

A CLI interface mola-lidar-odometry-cli is also provided for running on offline datasets.

Build and install

Refer to: https://docs.mola-slam.org/latest/#installing

Lidar Inertial Odometry (LIO) demo with Oxford Spires:

Lidar Odometry (LO) demo with KITTI:

Documentation and tutorials

See: https://docs.mola-slam.org/

ROS build farm status

Distro	Develop branch	Releases	Stable release
ROS2 Humble (u22.04)		amd64 arm64
ROS 2 Jazzy @ u24.04		amd64 arm64
ROS 2 Kilted @ u24.04		amd64 arm64
ROS 2 Rolling (u24.04)		amd64 arm64

EOL Distro	Last release
ROS2 Iron (u22.04)

Citation

The latest publication on MOLA is (ArXiV).

@article{blanco2025mola_lo,
    author = {Blanco-Claraco, Jose Luis},
    title ={{A flexible framework for accurate LiDAR odometry, map manipulation, and localization}},
    journal = {The International Journal of Robotics Research},
    volume = {44},
    number = {9},
    pages = {1553--1599},
    year = {2025},
    doi = {10.1177/02783649251316881},
    URL = { https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649251316881},
    eprint = {2407.20465},
}

License

Copyright (C) 2018-2025 Jose Luis Blanco jlblanco@ual.es, University of Almeria

This package is released under the GNU GPL v3 license as open source, with the main intention of being useful for research and evaluation purposes. Commercial licenses available upon request.

Changelog for package mola_lidar_odometry

1.2.0 (2025-10-21)

• Tune ROS2 publication rates for reduced viz load
• New option 'publish_deskewed_scans'
• Fix unit tests
• ros2 launch: sort arguments
• Contributors: Jose Luis Blanco-Claraco

1.1.0 (2025-10-20)

• Docs: describe the new GICP and LIO pipelines
• Update rviz settings
• Prefer to publish deskewed clouds in 'map' frame
• FIX: ROS2 interface must use correct cloud and pose timestamps
• Update and fix LIO ROS2 launch demo and docs
• ROS: support rendering deskewed clouds
• Replace deprecated ament_target_dependencies() with pure cmake
• Publish deskewed scans for ROS visualization
• Make use of ConstPtr for processing incoming observations
• Code clean up: remove macros for building against very old mola_kernel versions
• ros2 launch: add argument 'mola_tf_base_link'
• Contributors: Jose Luis Blanco-Claraco

1.0.0 (2025-10-13)

• Merge pull request #26 from MOLAorg/feature/better-lio Better LIO & new GICP pipeline
• CI: Run on ROS testing only
• Add custom 'name' to pipeline stages for profiler
• Update docs: Show example of use for MOLA_TF_BASE_LINK=os_sensor
• Feature: add option to save deskewed clouds
• refactor part of processScan() for code clarity
• fix clang-tidy warnings
• New config flag MOLA_SAVE_MM to save final metric map at session end
• add option to re-colorize clouds by intensity (local map)
• Add a clear message at initialization showing the name of the used pipeline
• Fix macro to detect newer mp2p_icp version
• cli app: show LO pose
• Refactor the way Lidar scans are enqueued depending on LO/LIO usage
• ICP pipelines: renamed old 'default' as 'icp', and add new 'default' symlink pointing to 'gicp'
• cli: use MOLA YAML parser for state estimation files
• Fix kitti eval scripts
• cli: fix expected contents of state estimation param files
• Debug traces: more covariance data
• GUI: Show keyframe stats
• configurable icp quality setpoint
• Fix lidar rate for multiple lidars
• New param to change the color of trajectory in the GUI
• reset local viz clouds when re-localizing
• gicp pipeline: use 2 resolutions (icp / map)
• Auto-scale intensity for visualization
• Less aggressive P controller for adaptive sigma
• Use adaptive sampler
• Update to latest mp2p_icp library API
• Progress optimizing new gicp pipeline
• New GICP pipeline file
• Fix for latest mola imu API changes
• Send velocity and orientations to the local velocity buffer
• Better visualization of current / past clouds, with configurable colormaps from the yaml file
• Move to the new deskew_method flag in mp2p_icp
• README.md: update bibtex reference
• Move IMU initialization to package mola_imu_preintegration
• IMU initializer moved out to the mola_imu_preintegration package for better reusability
• PitchRoll init: Add to-do note on IMU bias
• GUI: show lidar & imu rates
• remove obsolete pipeline
• Fix typos in YAML comments
• Configurable GUI background color
• Implement display dense local map (decaying deskewed clouds)
• Implement visualization of past clouds as transparent, decaying clouds
• Add missing header for latest mola_kernel
• option to show mulran dataset clouds with their real intensity channel
• Visualization: show the deskewed current observation instead of raw
• Contributors: Jose Luis Blanco-Claraco

0.9.0 (2025-08-26)

• FIX: bug in formula for pitch-roll initialization from IMU
• Store local IMU velocity buffer in key-frame simplemaps
• mola-lidar-odometry-cli: New CLI arguments to support datasets with IMUs
• Implement precise IMU-based deskew (requires latest mp2p_icp library)
• fix clang-format
• Modernize copyright notices
• rosbag2 mola-cli launch file: add [MOLA_ROS2BAG_EXPORT_TO_RAWLOG_FILE]{.title-ref} optional env var
• Contributors: Jose Luis Blanco-Claraco

0.8.0 (2025-06-06)

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