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To answer your question literally: There are plenty of message-passing protocols around that you could use to transfer the octomap between processes: zeroMQ, MQTT, gRPC, etc.; however, I would be surprised if those would give you much better results than using ROS with octomap_msgs. The reason is that the message from octomap_msgs simply wraps a binary .bt/.ot file, which is exactly what you would pass around using any other protocol, so there shouldn't be any significant overhead there.

A much better idea would probably be to use nodelets, so that you don't need any inter-process communication there. Two nodelets running in the same process don't even serialize/deserialize messages, they simply pass shared pointers around.