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cartographer ROS Multi-trajectories SLAM simulation with gazebo

I am using google cartographer SLAM package with turtlebot3. I followed the installation and have it working correctly with a single turtlebot3. My aim is to create a decentralized multi-robot system where each turtlebot3 creates a submap and these submaps are merged into a single global map.

I saw the Decentralized Multi Trajectory issue on github and also read the "Multi-trajectories SLAM" section in the Going further page where it explains that Cartographer can perform SLAM from multiple robots emitting data in parallel and this map merging is achieved through the usage of two ROS services start_trajectory and finish_trajectory. The cartographer ROS API provides information about start_trajectory and finish_trajectory services but I am new to using services and do not understand how I would set this up with 3 turtlebot3's in gazebo.

One option I am looking at is to run cartographer separately on all 3 turtlebot3's and publish each of their submaps. Then I can use the multirobotmapmerge package to merge their maps but this multirobotmapmerge have been giving inaccurate merged maps when I used gmapping slam, so I am skeptical about using it with cartographer.

I found a package called decentralizedmultirobot_exploration on github that uses the Stage simulator with cartographer and multiple robots but I am unsure how I would do the same using gazebo instead of stage.

Asked by hunterlineage1 on 2023-04-16 01:40:09 UTC

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