hector_mapping reducing cpu consumption?

edit

I haven´t tried things on Pandaboard, so not sure what to expect. That being said, I also noticed that CPU consumption lately was much higher than normal (nearly maxing out a i7 core on our USAR vehicles). As there haven´t been changes to the code in quite some time, I suspect that there might be a problem with one of the used libraries or the build settings. Can you edit your question with information on how you generated the executables (installed from .debs or compiled yourself)?

/edit: There seems to be something wrong with compile flags, see hector_slam issue 11

/edit2: I´d recommend building explicitly in Release mode as suggested in above ticket, just to make sure.

I think it is normal. I run hector_mapping on an Intel PC and I used to see hector_mapping over 100% all the time.

You can adjust the parameters (for me, they're in hector_mapping/mapping_default.launch) to ignore as much of the laser scan as possible. Bump up laser_min_distance. Bump down map_pub_period and laser_max_distance. Maybe there are a few other parameters that have some effect. You can see a list of params on the wiki page. In hector_nav.launch, decrease the map size.

A hacky fix: you can install cpulimit and throttle the CPU usage to whatever you please. I'm using 80% without any noticeable ill effects:

cpulimit -e hector_mapping -l 80