Cartographer ROS Integration

• Configuration
• Tuning
  • Two systems
  • Built-in tools
  • Example: tuning local SLAM
  • Special Cases
• ROS API
  • Cartographer Node
  • Offline Node
  • Occupancy grid Node
• Assets writer
  • Sample usage
  • Configuration
  • First-person visualization of point clouds
• Demos
  • Pure localization
  • Revo LDS
  • PR2
  • Taurob Tracker
• Public Data
  • 2D Cartographer Backpack – Deutsches Museum
  • 3D Cartographer Backpack – Deutsches Museum
  • PR2 – Willow Garage
  • Magazino
• Frequently asked questions
  • Why is laser data rate in the 3D bags higher than the maximum reported 20 Hz rotation speed of the VLP-16?
  • Why is IMU data required for 3D SLAM but not for 2D?
  • How do I build cartographer_ros without rviz support?
  • How do I fix the “You called InitGoogleLogging() twice!” error?

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.

System Requirements

See Cartographer’s system requirements.

The following ROS distributions are currently supported:

• Indigo
• Kinetic

Building & Installation

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 proto3.
src/cartographer/scripts/install_proto3.sh

# Install deb dependencies.
# The command 'sudo rosdep init' will print an error if you have already
# executed it since installing ROS. This error can be ignored.
sudo rosdep init
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 demos

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/with_intensities/b3-2016-04-05-14-14-00.bag

# Launch the 3D backpack demo.
roslaunch cartographer_ros demo_backpack_3d.launch bag_filename:=${HOME}/Downloads/b3-2016-04-05-14-14-00.bag

The launch files will bring up roscore and rviz automatically. See Demos for additional demos including localization and various robots.