Mapping Multiple Facilities

[spelletier]

Hello,

We are working on a project that will involve a robot mapping and navigating through multiple facilities using rtabmap. I was wondering if there was already an expected method of handling multiple facilities using the existing databases? Would it make sense to map multiple facilities and combine them into a single map? or maybe have individual database files that are used depending on the context?

Any insight into a bit of the design context here and what was the intended approach for multi-facility mapping would be very much appreciated.

[matlabbe]

Hi,

There is no specific mechanism in rtabmap to handle multiple facilities, they would be all merged together in the same database (if the mapping sessions overlap). Would the robot need to navigate autonomously between the facilities? If not, creating a new database for each facility may be the easiest way to manage them if the robot can somewhat knows which map to load.

A similar issue is 2D mapping for multi-floor buildings, a database would be created for each floor. If the robot knows at which floor it is (based on atmospheric pressure or if the robot can read floor number), it would load the corresponding map.

Splitting the environment in multiple maps can also be useful for computing performance, to avoid loading too much data in memory that the robot won't use anyway.

cheers,
Mathieu