RTAB Map System Requirements

[alpine.ninja.nz]

Hi All,

I couldn't find any recommendations for system specifications to run RTAB Map.
Can anyone advise me on what these might be?
- Processor Speed and Number of Cores
- RAM
- Graphics Card (ATI/Nvidia) (Shared/Dedicated) (RAM Size)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[matlabbe]

Hi,

I'm testing mostly on my macbook pro mid2010, so maybe any laptop since 6 years. A dedicated GPU is recommended for visualization. At least 6-8 GB of RAM and a SSD is a must too. If you can have 4 cores it can help to get all threads running fluidly at the same time with a decent frame rate. It can work on RaspberryPi, but the frame rate is low (so we cannot move fast).

On our robot, we have i7 2 cores without GPU (visualization is done on a remote computer so we don't need a GPU on the robot). Note that on this setup visual odometry is not used, wheel odometry (a lot less computationally expensive) with lidar ICP refining is used instead.

cheers

[Shirantha]

Hi,

Is it a must to have a dedicated graphics card in order to use rtabmap??

thanks

[matlabbe]

For visualization, otherwise 3D rendering may lag. On a robot (without a display) it is not required.

[alpine.ninja.nz]

Hi,
I experience the following error when opening rtab on my T410 Lenovo laptop.

ERROR: In C:\workspace\VTK-7.0.0\Rendering\OpenGL2\vtkOpenGLRenderWindow.cxx, line 545
vtkWin32OpenGLRenderWindow (0000000004E44730): GL version 2.1 with the gpu_shader4 extension is not supported by your graphics driver but is required for the new OpenGL rendering backend. Please update your OpenGL driver. If you are using Mesa please make sure you have version 10.6.5 or later and make sure your driver in Mesa supports OpenGL 3.2.

I know it has integrated graphics, and this is not ideal for 3d visuals, but i am wondering if i can still run the application without the 3d window and extract/save the resulting point cloud data? Is there an older renderer version of the software i could use?

[matlabbe]

Hi,

Unfortunately, I don't have a Windows computer without a discrete GPU to test with. The renderer is based on VTK OpenGL window. To use an older OpenGL version, we would have to rebuild with an older VTK version (still not sure if it could solve that problem). There is also no way to disable the 3D Renderer on the standalone app. Well, you can try copying this config file rtabmap.ini in your Documents/.rtabmap/rtabmap.ini, I closed the 3D Map view, so depending if the OpenGL renderer is created before or after it is shown, it may work.

In the previous post, when I said "without a GPU", it is the ROS version on Ubuntu. The core and GUI modules are split in two different processes, so we can use only one or both.

cheers