Cartographer Project Overview

See https://github.com/googlecartographer/cartographer

Installation

Installation has been tested on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) with ROS Indigo and on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) with ROS Kinetic. For ROS Kinetic, simply replace the two occurrences of "indigo" with "kinetic" in the instructions below. There are multiple options for building cartographer_ros as part of a ROS workspace. Two common use cases are described below.

These dependencies always have to be installed:

# Install the required libraries that are available as debs
sudo apt-get install \
  ros-indigo-tf2-eigen \
  g++ \
  google-mock \
  libboost-all-dev \
  liblua5.2-dev \
  libprotobuf-dev \
  libsuitesparse-dev \
  libwebp-dev \
  protobuf-compiler \
  python-sphinx \
  libpcap-dev  # For 3D SLAM with Velodynes

Standalone Workspace

# Set up your Catkin workspace
mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src
cd ~/catkin_ws/src
source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash
catkin_init_workspace

# Clone the necessary repos into your Catkin workspace
git clone https://github.com/googlecartographer/cartographer.git
git clone https://github.com/googlecartographer/cartographer_ros.git
git clone https://github.com/ethz-asl/ceres_catkin.git  # Caution! Make sure you do not have "suitesparse" in you Catkin workspace
git clone https://github.com/ethz-asl/glog_catkin.git
git clone https://github.com/ethz-asl/gflags_catkin.git
git clone https://github.com/ethz-asl/catkin_simple.git
git clone https://github.com/ros-drivers/velodyne.git  # For 3D SLAM with Velodynes

# Build everything in your Catkin workspace
cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin_make_isolated
source devel_isolated/setup.bash

Using wstool

If cartographer_ros is to be used as part of a pre-existing workspace/existing project, using wstool is recommended.

# Enter workspace root (i.e. the folder that has "src" as a subfolder)
# Merge the cartographer_ros rosinstall file
wstool merge https://raw.githubusercontent.com/googlecartographer/cartographer_ros/master/cartographer_ros.rosinstall

# Update workspace
wstool update

# Build workspace contents. It is recommended to use catkin tools:
catkin build