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SteveMacenski / slam_toolbox

Slam Toolbox for lifelong mapping and localization in potentially massive maps with ROS
GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
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Slam Toolbox and Cartographer #122

Closed RonaldEnsing closed 4 years ago

RonaldEnsing commented 4 years ago

Thanks a lot for the great talk at ROScon. Unfortunately, there was no opportunity for questions at the end of the talk, so that's why I open a discussion here.

I am very much interested in the relation between Slam Toolbox and Cartographer. What were the most important reasons that you chose to write a new SLAM package, instead of extending cartographer? The Slam Toolbox readme states: 'This project contains the ability to do most everything any other available SLAM library, both free and paid, and more.' However, I am not convinced, especially since cartographer is able to do SLAM in 3D and is able to include the GNSS in the pose graph optimization.

SteveMacenski commented 4 years ago

There is basically no relationship between this work and cartographer.

By in large, cartographer does not work for most indoor industrial applications. This is a result I’ve come to from my experiences as well as polling members of the community. By in large, no one has gotten the performance or stability out of cartographer required for a serious product. Of course there are a few notable exceptions to that, but I’m not trying to solve the exceptional cases but the majority of cases.

I provide nearly all interfaces needed for industrial large-scale slam. It is not my intention with this work to extend to 3D lidars. 3D lidar support on top of a project that doesn’t meet the base specs of most users is pretty much a non-feature. Cartographer was not designed or implemented for robots and their performance shows that.

If you get adequate results for your needs with Cartographer, I’m not certainly one to push you to do one thing or another, however the fact that Google themselves have abandoned this work and their google robotics cloud platform surrounding that package speaks volumes over any technical explanation I could provide.

RonaldEnsing commented 4 years ago

Thank you for this explanation. I am interested in outdoor 3D SLAM for self-driving cars. Since Slam Toolbox is particularly suitable for 2D indoor, I'll stick with cartographer (3D) for now. I get decent results with cartographer in offline mode. However, since the computations are quite heavy, I haven't got it fast enough for online mode. Because of that, I am still interested in any other SLAM package.

There are so many open source SLAM packages available. I think that an effort to work towards a general SLAM package seems reasonable and desirable to me. I'll keep an eye out on the discourse as well: https://discourse.ros.org/t/supporting-maintaining-slam-in-ros2-input-requested/10986/39

SteveMacenski commented 4 years ago

Well I certainly support the concept of that discussion, but we also need more people (like you!) to get involved in putting boots on the ground to make it happen. I’m more than willing to spin up an official TSC sponsored ROS2 working group to make it happen, but it can’t just be me +/- a part time Amazon engineer. 3D support is something I believe strongly in.

This work is not intended or geared to autonomous driving. Frankly I think its dangerous for anyone to use Cartographer or this project in autonomous driving for countless reasons, but that’s up to you and your risk management team.

RonaldEnsing commented 4 years ago

Well I certainly support the concept of that discussion, but we also need more people (like you!) to get involved in putting boots on the ground to make it happen. I’m more than willing to spin up an official TSC sponsored ROS2 working group to make it happen, but it can’t just be me +/- a part time Amazon engineer. 3D support is something I believe strongly in.

I would be happy to see where I can join. Shall we proceed the discussion on the discourse?

This work is not intended or geared to autonomous driving. Frankly I think its dangerous for anyone to use Cartographer or this project in autonomous driving for countless reasons, but that’s up to you and your risk management team.

Yeah, we are not using cartographer or any other SLAM package for experiments where the car actually drives. We use cartographer for data sets that were recorded in regular, manual driving mode.

SteveMacenski commented 4 years ago

Let me figure that out, but yeah posting on that thread is a good way to keep all the information in one spot.