RTAB looks cool, but

[DougalDC]

Is it any good for slam with a full on drone?

By that, I mean, looking at the usage and most demos, it looks to be mainly for a ground based robot, and the 2d mapping it makes looks great for that.

But what about with a copter, with lots of verticality. is there any example of anyone using RTAB with success as primary slam in a big 3d volume?

Thanks

Dougal

[matlabbe]

I cannot disclose yet one of a project I am working on, but yes RTAB-Map can work on a drone in large indoor space (volume around 70mx70mx100m). For all trajectory planning/exploration, the generated OctoMap topic from rtabmap is used.

However, yes, all demos/examples are often done on a 2d robot, so all default parameters are tuned for 2d mapping.

If you want an example with a drone, look at this example: https://github.com/matlabbe/rtabmap_drone_example
It is however doing 2d navigation, but you could change the move_base node by a 3D planner and use the OctoMap instead of the 2D occupancy grid. Here an example using that demo (Grid/MaxGroundHeight and Grid/MaxObstacleHeight are set to 0 to have all obstacles in the OctoMap):

With OctoMap, we can increase the size of the voxel for extensive planning, here with a tree depth of 14:


If I have some time to get familiar with some standard 3D planning approaches (like OMPL / moveit), I could improve the rtabmap_drone_example with a 3D example using the OctoMap.

Other 3D examples using a car (though here it was just mapping):
http://official-rtab-map-forum.206.s1.nabble.com/Challenges-on-odometry-when-the-street-has-high-slopes-tp8000p8019.html

http://official-rtab-map-forum.206.s1.nabble.com/Ouster-drive-under-the-rain-tp6496.html

Regards,
Mathieu

[DougalDC]

Excellent, thank you, that gives me so much more to look at, the key being using OctoMap, those projects are exactly what I could not find.
Many thanks for taking the time to show them to me :)