The Map My World project is the SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) project of the Udacity Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree. A Real-Time Appearance Based Mapping (RTAB-Map) via ROS packages are applied to perform SLAM in a simulated environment.
Note: See the writeup for theoretical content on SLAM algorithms and complete specifics of RTAB-Map with Results.
The project was developed on Ubuntu environment of Udacity Workspace with ROS Kinetic, Gazebo and catkin installed.
The robot relies on the rtabmap_ros ROS package, which should be installed in local system through apt-get.
Run and build the packages using:
$ cd catkin_ws
$ catkin_make
$ source devel/setup.bash
The below commands are allowed to run in separate terminals:
Launch the world in Gazebo:
$ roslaunch slam_project slam_world.launch
Launch the teleop node for keyboard control:
$ roslaunch slam_project teleop.launch
Launch the RTAB-Map mapping node
$ roslaunch slam_project mapping.launch
Launch the RViz GUI:
$ roslaunch slam_project rviz.launch
** Note: ** The default world is the custom world Door_To_Door_Service.world. To run kitchen_dining.world, change in world.launch file for kitchen_dining.world in place of Door_To_Door_Service.world
There are two tasks involved in this project:
- build up robot model configuration
- Integrate
rtabmapfor SLAM.
The robot model was extended from the previous project RoboND-Where-Am-I and has an RGB-D camera to input depth information to RTAB-Map.
The robot uses the information from the odometer, the RGB-D camera and the laser rangefinder to perform SLAM in the designated environment through rtabmap. The rtabmap library produces map database files that can be read by its own visualization tools. Here is an image of the reconstructed kitchen dining environment:
The 2D Map represesntation of Kitchen_dining.world:
The 3D Map representation through RTAB-Map's database viewer for custom world:
The 2D Map represesntation of Door_To_Door_Service.world:
The project is developed with an intent of Door to Door robot delivery service for food or medical supplies. In future, such work could be a possible reality !!