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Introducing Cartographer

From Damon Kohler, Wolfgang Hess, and Holger Rapp, Google Engineering

We are happy to announce the open source release of Cartographer, a real-time SLAM library in 2D and 3D with ROS support.

Cartographer builds globally consistent maps in real-time across a broad range of sensor configurations common in academia and industry. The following video is a demonstration Cartographer's real-time loop closure:

A detailed description of Cartographer's 2D algorithms can be found in our ICRA 2016 paper.

Thanks to ROS integration and support from external contributors, Cartographer is ready to use on several robot platforms with ROS support:

• Toyota HSR
• TurtleBots
• PR2
• Revo LDS

At Google, Cartographer has enabled a range of applications from mapping museums and transit hubs to enabling new visualizations of famous buildings.

We recognize the value of high quality datasets to the research community. That's why, thanks to cooperation with the Deutsches Museum (the largest tech museum in the world), we are also releasing three years of LIDAR and IMU data collected using our 2D and 3D mapping backpack platforms during the development and testing of Cartographer.

Our focus is on advancing and democratizing SLAM as a technology. Currently, Cartographer is heavily focused on LIDAR SLAM. Through continued development and community contributions, we hope to add both support for more sensors and platforms as well as new features, such as lifelong mapping and localizing in a pre-existing map.

• Cartographer announcemet on the Google Open Source Blog

• TRI's demonstration on the HSR has a fun video

Cartographer ROS Integration

Cartographer is a system that provides real-time simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in 2D and 3D across multiple platforms and sensor configurations. This project provides Cartographer's ROS integration.

Building & Installation

Installation has been tested on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) with ROS Indigo, but may also work on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) with ROS Kinetic. We recommend using wstool and rosdep. For faster builds, we also recommend using Ninja.

# Install wstool and rosdep.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install -y python-wstool python-rosdep ninja-build

# Create a new workspace in 'catkin_ws'.

mkdir catkin_ws

cd catkin_ws

wstool init src

# Merge the cartographer_ros.rosinstall file and fetch code for dependencies.

wstool merge -t src https://raw.githubusercontent.com/googlecartographer/cartographer_ros/master/cartographer_ros.rosinstall

wstool update -t src

# Install deb dependencies.

rosdep update

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro=${ROS_DISTRO} -y

# Build and install.

catkin_make_isolated --install --use-ninja

source install_isolated/setup.bash

Running the demo

Now that Cartographer and Cartographer's ROS integration are installed, download the example bags (e.g. 2D and 3D backpack collections of the Deutsches Museum) to a known location, in this case ~/Downloads, and use roslaunch to bring up the demo:

# Download the 2D backpack example bag.

wget -P ~/Downloads https://storage.googleapis.com/cartographer-public-data/bags/backpack_2d/cartographer_paper_deutsches_museum.bag

# Launch the 2D backpack demo.

roslaunch cartographer_ros demo_backpack_2d.launch bag_filename:=${HOME}/Downloads/cartographer_paper_deutsches_museum.bag

# Download the 3D backpack example bag.

wget -P ~/Downloads https://storage.googleapis.com/cartographer-public-data/bags/backpack_3d/cartographer_3d_deutsches_museum.bag

# Launch the 3D backpack demo.

roslaunch cartographer_ros demo_backpack_3d.launch bag_filename:=${HOME}/Downloads/cartographer_3d_deutsches_museum.bag

# Download the Revo LDS example bag.

wget -P ~/Downloads https://storage.googleapis.com/cartographer-public-data/bags/revo_lds/cartographer_paper_revo_lds.bag

# Launch the Revo LDS demo.

roslaunch cartographer_ros demo_revo_lds.launch bag_filename:=${HOME}/Downloads/cartographer_paper_revo_lds.bag

# Download the PR2 example bag.

wget -P ~/Downloads https://storage.googleapis.com/cartographer-public-data/bags/pr2/2011-09-15-08-32-46.bag

# Launch the PR2 demo.

roslaunch cartographer_ros demo_pr2.launch bag_filename:=${HOME}/Downloads/2011-09-15-08-32-46.bag

The launch files will bring up roscore and rviz automatically.