Atom Mapping is a ROS package that implements a novel form of 3D mapping, intended for use in real-time robot navigation and planning. In essence, an Atom Map is a generalized occupancy grid that exists in continuous space, and is not restricted to a grid-like structure. Moreover, the general concept is amenable to metrics other than traditional metrics of occupancy, for example it can store the signed distance to an obstacle.
Atom Mapping is developed by Erik Nelson and David Fridovich-Keil. Erik is currently with nuro.ai, and David is with the Hybrid Systems Lab and the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research lab.
AtomMap is set up as a single ROS package that can be downloaded and integrated into existing ROS projects with ease. We also provide a sample client as an example of how AtomMap could be used.
Although the code is well-documented, we encourage you to read our ICRA 2017 paper, linked here.
To build AtomMap you will need to have ROS installed on your machine. Clone the repository and build as follows:
git clone https://github.com/ucberkeley-vip/atom_mapping
cd atom_mapping
cd internal
catkin_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
The last command above will build both the atom_map package and the atom_map_example package. In order to run the example, you will also need to have installed the BLAM package.
You may need to adjust the test.launch file in atom_map_example for your system, and also the launch file for BLAM. Once you have all paths fixed for your system, though, running the example is very simple (using multiple terminal windows):
roscore
rviz
roslaunch blam_example test_offline.launch
roslaunch atom_map_example test.launch
Please visit our wiki for more details.
If you run into any issues building or using this package, please feel free to post an issue and one of us will get back to you as quickly as possible.
If you find AtomMap useful in your own work, we request that you cite our paper.