Preference sections grayed out

[Pooya63]

Hi Mathieu,

I have a question about the advanced preferences section. When I run RTAB map using ROS (melodic), most settings in the preferences window are available, except for the 'odometry' tab. I've tried many things but it seems it cannot be accessed. Is there a way to access the odometry settings in the GUI? Also in the launchfiles that come with the package I could not find odometry settings (rtabmapl.launch file).

Thanks in advance,
Pooya

[matlabbe]

Hi,

Odometry parameters cannot be modified by rtabmapviz. We should set them in arguments of the odometry node or use param tags. For a list of odometry parameters, see Visual and Lidar odometry section on wiki: http://wiki.ros.org/rtabmap_ros#Visual_and_Lidar_Odometry

$ rosrun rtabmap_ros rgbd_odometry --params

You then use them like one of these two ways (argument or param):

<node pkg="rtabmap_ros" type="rgbd_odometry" name="odometry" args:="--Odom/Strategy 0">
  <param name="Odom/Strategy" value="0"/>
</node>

When using rtabmap.launch:

$ roslaunch rtabmap_ros rtabmap.launch odom_args:="--Odom/Strategy 0"

cheers,
Mathieu

[Pooya63]

Hi Mathieu

Thank you very much for your help. It works (switching between F2M and F2F). However, for a project, I am aiming at comparing different odometry methods such as ORB and DVO, similar to the content of your recent paper. But I receive the error that "RTAB-MAP is not built with ORB_SLAM2 support" when I set the Odom/Strategy to 5. Is there a way to activate these options? I need to do it in ROS as I want to later connect it to other ROS nodes.

Best Regards,
Pooya

-----
p.s: I enjoyed very much reading the well-written informative paper “RTAB-Map as an Open-Source Lidar and Visual SLAM Library for Large-Scale and Long-Term Online Operation”. I think that RtabMAp is the best ROS package for SLAM. You are saving people like me a lot of effort and time. I sincerely thank you for this.

[matlabbe]

Hi,

Thank you for appreciation of this software. It always nice receiving some feedback.

To use odometry approaches showing those warnings, you have to build rtabmap from source with the corresponding approach installed. When doing "cmake .." in rtabmap/build directory, you can see at the end of cmake output the info about the dependencies found. WITH_ORBSLAM2 should be YES to have access afterwards (after being built) with Odom/Strategy=5.

For ORB_SLAM2 dependency, see this post for some installation issues: https://github.com/introlab/rtabmap/issues/287#issuecomment-401147876

cheers,
Mathieu