/orb_slam3_ros_wrapper

A ROS wrapper for ORB-SLAM3. Focus on portability and flexibility.

Primary LanguageC++

ROS wrapper for ORB-SLAM3

A ROS wrapper for ORB-SLAM3. The main idea is to use the ORB-SLAM3 as a standalone library and interface with it instead of putting everything together. For that, you can check out this package.

Tested with ORB-SLAM3 V1.0, primarily on Ubuntu 20.04.

  • Pros:
    • Easy to update ORB-SLAM3 indepedently.
    • Easy to replace different variants that are not built for ROS.
  • Cons:
    • Dependent on the exposed APIs from ORB-SLAM3.
    • Development involves more steps (1. Make changes in ORB-SLAM3 library -> 2. Build ORB-SLAM3 -> 3. Change the roswrapper if necessary -> 4. Test).
    • Might break when dependencies or upstream changes.

Installation

General guide: first, install ORB-SLAM3 normally with all of its dependencies (any location is fine). Then, install this package in a catkin build environment.

1. ORB-SLAM3

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/UZ-SLAMLab/ORB_SLAM3.git ORB_SLAM3
  • Make changes to the source code if necessary to build successfully. For Ubuntu 20.04, you will need to change CMakeList from C++11 to C++14. I have incorporated the changes in this fork.
  • Build:
cd ORB_SLAM3
chmod +x build.sh
./build.sh
  • Make sure that libORB_SLAM3.so is created in the ORB_SLAM3/lib folder. If not, check the issue list from the original repo and retry.

2. orb_slam3_ros_wrapper

  • Clone the package. Note that it should be a catkin build workspace.
cd ~/catkin_ws/src/
git clone https://github.com/thien94/orb_slam3_ros_wrapper.git
  • Open CMakeLists.txt and change the directory that leads to ORB-SLAM3 library at the beginning of the file (default is home folder ~/)
cd ~/catkin_ws/src/orb_slam3_ros_wrapper/
nano CMakeLists.txt

# Change this to your installation of ORB-SLAM3. Default is ~/
set(ORB_SLAM3_DIR
   $ENV{HOME}/ORB_SLAM3
)
  • Build the package normally.
cd ~/catkin_ws/
catkin build

  • Next, copy the ORBvoc.txt file from ORB-SLAM3/Vocabulary/ folder to the config folder in this package. Alternatively, you can change the voc_file param in the launch file to point to the right location.

  • (Optional) Install hector-trajectory-server to visualize the trajectory.

sudo apt install ros-[DISTRO]-hector-trajectory-server
  • If everything works fine, you can now try the different launch files in the launch folder.

3. How to run

EuRoC dataset:

  • In one terminal, launch the node:
roslaunch orb_slam3_ros_wrapper euroc_monoimu.launch
  • In another terminal, playback the bag:
rosbag play MH_01_easy.bag

Similarly for other sensor types.

Topics

The following topics are published by each node:

  • /orb_slam3/map_points (PointCloud2): all keypoints being tracked.
  • /orb_slam3/camera_pose (PoseStamped): current left camera pose in world frame, as returned by ORB-SLAM3.
  • tf: transformation from camera frame to world frame.