Other SLAM Algorithms: CoreSLAM

gmapping is the map building (SLAM) software most commonly used in ROS. It works very well if you have a very high quality and long-range laser. The Neato laser is neither high quality nor long range (and the low-cost Hokuyos, while fairly accurate, are still near-sighted). There isn't a lot of academic literature that mentions low-cost lidars (unless it's a paper about building a low cost module).

One paper recently published that actually uses a short range Hokuyo is CoreSLAM, a SLAM implementation in under 200 lines of code. Well..., the map update/storage aspects are less than 200 lines of C code, however the complete system relies on a bit more, namely a particle filter for localization.

It looked good. So I integrated it into ROS:



This map is currently only using odometry, I'm going to try and get the MCL localization aspects working more tomorrow. I also need to get the map_saver to work with my ROS wrapper. I hope to have this on our SVN by the weekend.

-Fergs