Unitree G1
Bipedal humanoid robot by Unitree Robotics, designed as a compact research, development, and developer platform.
Applications
- Research
- Home Assistance
Perception · Perception & Vision Software
lio-sam-ros2 (community port)·Tixiao Shan (autor LIO-SAM)
LIO-SAM (Tightly-Coupled LiDAR-Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping) is an open-source 3D LiDAR-Inertial SLAM framework developed at MIT CSAIL's Marine Robotics Group (Prof. John J. Leonard) by Tixiao Shan, Brendan Englot, Drew Meyers, Wei Wang, Carlo Ratti, and Daniela Rus (IROS 2020). The innovation: tightly-coupled fusion of LiDAR + IMU + GPS in a factor graph using the GTSAM library (Georgia Tech). BSD-3-Clause license.
The factor-graph architecture contains four types of factors: (1) IMU preintegration factors between LiDAR frames (~10 Hz), (2) LiDAR odometry factors with scan-to-local-map matching, (3) GPS factors for absolute global localization (optional), (4) loop closure factors with appearance or geometric matching. Optimization via iSAM2 (incremental smoothing and mapping) — efficient online update without full re-optimization. A sliding-window LiDAR matching keeps the computational complexity constant.
Sensor support: Velodyne VLP-16/HDL-32/HDL-64, Ouster OS0/OS1/OS2, Livox Mid-70/Mid-360/Avia, 9-axis IMUs (e.g., Xsens MTi-300, Bosch BMI088). ROS 1 package and a community port for ROS 2 Humble. A baseline benchmark for hundreds of new LiDAR-Inertial SLAM papers (e.g., FAST-LIO, FAST-LIO2, Point-LIO, LVI-SAM by the same author). Runs in real time on Jetson AGX Orin and consumer CPUs (Intel i7+). LIO-SAM has been used in the MIT autonomous "Roboat" boat as well as many mobile robots and off-road autonomous vehicles.
A Perception Stack encompasses the software layers that process data from cameras, LiDARs, IMUs, microphones, and other sensors in order to recognise the surrounding environment, perform localisation, detect and track objects, and interpret the scene. It is typically the first processing stage in an autonomous robot's data pipeline, feeding its outputs to planning and control stacks.
An API Library is a software package that exposes programmatic interfaces for communicating with a device, service, or system. In robotics it typically forms a lightweight integration layer built on top of the manufacturer's official API or an open-source project, abstracting low-level protocol details and providing language-native bindings (Python, C++, Java, etc.).
A family of open-source robotic perception libraries: Visual SLAM (ORB-SLAM, RTAB-Map), computer vision (OpenCV), point cloud processing (PCL, Open3D), detection and segmentation (YOLO, Detectron2).
MIT Roboat — an autonomous research boat in Amsterdam (Senseable City Lab + AMS Institute) uses LIO-SAM as the base localization stack. Off-road autonomous vehicles (Hyundai, Toyota Research). An academic benchmark cited in hundreds of IROS / ICRA / RSS 2021–2025 papers. A foundation for many commercial mobile-mapping systems (FARO, Emesent Hovermap).
github.com/TixiaoShan/LIO-SAM ~3.8k★, ~1.3k forks. The seminal paper (Shan et al., IROS 2020) has > 1500 citations. Active fork lio-sam-ros2 (~700★) for ROS 2.
Bipedal humanoid robot by Unitree Robotics, designed as a compact research, development, and developer platform.
Unitree H1 is a full-size general-purpose humanoid robot (~180 cm, ~47 kg). Bipedal, 5 DOF per leg + 4 DOF per arm, 3.3 m/s walking speed, 360° perception via 3D LiDAR + depth camera, Unitree M107 PMSM joint motors with ~360 N·m peak knee torque. Standard compute: Intel Core i5/i7; optional NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX.
Boston Dynamics bipedal humanoid robot. The fully electric generation unveiled in 2024 succeeds the hydraulic Atlas that was retired after more than a decade of research.
Requires GTSAM ≥ 4.0.3, PCL ≥ 1.10, OpenCV ≥ 4.2, Eigen3 ≥ 3.3.7. Ubuntu 20.04 + ROS 1 Noetic (original) or Ubuntu 22.04 + ROS 2 Humble (community fork lio-sam-ros2).
License family: Permissive
First stable community port to ROS 2 Humble (maintained by yashvardhansethi/lio-sam-ros2).
GTSAM 4.1 and Ubuntu 22.04 compatibility.
Livox solid-state LiDAR support (Mid-70, Avia).
Ouster OS1 support; added custom point types.
Stable production release; API cleanup, documentation, full Velodyne support.
First public open-source release accompanying the IROS 2020 paper.
