  We equip an ultra-wideband (UWB) node and a 2D LiDAR sensor a.k.a. 2D laser
rangefinder on a mobile robot, and place UWB beacon nodes at unknown locations
in an unknown environment. All UWB nodes can do ranging with each other thus
forming a cooperative sensor network. We propose to fuse the peer-to-peer
ranges measured between UWB nodes and laser scanning information, i.e. range
measured between robot and nearby objects/obstacles, for simultaneous
localization of the robot, all UWB beacons, and LiDAR mapping. The fusion is
inspired by two facts: 1) LiDAR may improve UWB-only localization accuracy as
it gives a more precise and comprehensive picture of the surrounding
environment; 2) on the other hand, UWB ranging measurements may remove the
error accumulated in the LiDAR-based SLAM algorithm. Our experiments
demonstrate that UWB/LiDAR fusion enables drift-free SLAM in real-time based on
ranging measurements only.
