How to implement autonomous navigation with Google Cartographer?

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I am trying to implement autonomous navigation using 2 lasers and a depth camera. IMU and odometry data will also be available. Basically, I'd like to have the simulated robot spawned in some gazebo world and autonomously drive around it covering all of the floor space.

So far, I've come to the conclusion that using cartographer is best for me because it allows 2 lasers to be directly used without additional tools. However, before trying this I'd played around with gmapping and AMCL, where I'd do the following as a starting point for autonomous exploration:

1. Generate a map by manually moving around
2. Save the map and serve it
3. Localise the robot on the map
4. Provide waypoints to move_base

My question is, what is the order of operations when using cartographer? In my launch file would it just be a cartographer and move_base node and then something else to for frontier exploration? I suppose I'm a bit confused whether I need to replicate the workflow used above with gmapping and AMCL or whether the single cartographer node handles both of these roles in one step.

I'm really getting stuck with some of the tutorials I see online for this as I'm unsure how to adapt them to my use case. I've looked at here, which seems handy but it doesn't work for me as it doesn't do anything when I graphically set a 2DNavGoal in RViz.