EverySync: An Open Hardware Time Synchronization Sensor Suite for Common Sensors in SLAM

Multi-sensor fusion systems have been widely applied in various fields, including mobile robot, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and autonomous driving. For a tightly coupled multi-sensor fusion system, strict time synchronization between sensors will improve the accuracy of the system. However, there is currently a lack of open- source and general-purpose hardware synchronization systems for Cameras, IMUs, LiDARs, GNSS/RTK in the academic community. Therefore, we propose EverySync, an open hard- ware time synchronization system to address this gap. The synchronization accuracy of the system was evaluated through multiple experiments, achieving an accuracy of less than 1 ms. And, real-world experiments proved that hardware time synchronization improves the accuracy of the SLAM system. This open-source system is available on GitHub.