Personal repository of our work SLAMesh, please raise issues here so that I can get reminders immediately. The code may also more friendly to use and read, but I don't always guarantee it can replicate the result in out paper.

We are confident that this work introduced a novel approach to LiDAR SLAM, so we publish the code to benefit robotics society and welcome everyone to explore opportunities in this approach. 👬

17/Aug/2023, Code released. Spent some time to make my code more user-friendly 😤, feel free to contact me with any questions.

10/Mar/2023, Preprint of our paper can be found on: paper.

16/Jan/2023, The paper has been accepted for presentation on ICRA 2023,

This work designs a Simultaneously Localization And Meshing system (SLAMesh). Mesh is a lightweight 3-D dense model. It can model complex structures and has the feasibility for rendering. We bridge localization with meshing at the same time to benefit each other.

• Build, register, and update the mesh maps in real time with CPU resources. The experiments show that our SLAMesh can run at around 40 Hz.
• Provide accurate odometry. The localization and meshing accuracy also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
• Different from point-cloud (LOAM), NDT, and Surfel map SLAM, this work has established a new approach to LiDAR SLAM.
• The key idea is that we conduct a reconstruction of the raw point cloud before registration. This strategy enables fast meshing, data-association without the kd-tree.

Author: Jianyuan Ruan, Bo Li, Yibo Wang, Yuxiang Sun.

On public dataset:

(or watch it on bilibili)

On self-collected dataset:

(or watch it on bilibili)

If you find our research helpful, please cite our paper. :

[1] Jianyuan Ruan, Bo Li, Yibo Wang, and Yuxiang Sun, "SLAMesh: Real-time LiDAR Simultaneous Localization and Meshing" ICRA 2023.

Other related papers:

[2] Jianyuan Ruan, Bo Li, Yinqiang Wang and Zhou Fang, "GP-SLAM+: real-time 3D lidar SLAM based on improved regionalized Gaussian process map reconstruction," IROS 2020. link.

[3] Bo Li, Jianyuan Ruan, Yu Zhang, et al, 3D SLAM method based on improved regionalized Gaussian process map construction, 2020 International Conference on Guidance, Navigation and Control (ICGNC), 2022. link

[4] Jianyuan Ruan, Zhou Fang, Bo Li, et al, Evaluation of GP-SLAM in real-world environments, 2019 Chinese Automation Congress (CAC), 2019. link

[5] Bo Li, Yinqiang Wang, Yu Zhang. Wenjie Zhao, Jianyuan Ruan, and Pin Li, "GP-SLAM: laser-based SLAM approach based on regionalized Gaussian process map reconstruction". Auton Robot 2020.link

If you understand Chinese, you can also refer to my Master's thesis (now can download it without login) and an article on the WeChat platform: SLAMesh: 实时LiDAR定位与网格化模型构建 .

We tested our code in Ubuntu18.04 with ROS melodic and Ubuntu20.04 with ROS neotic.

ROS

Install ros following ROS Installation. We use the PCL and Eigen library in ROS.

Ceres

Follow Ceres Installation to install Ceres Solver, tested version: 2.0, 2.1 (Error observed with V-2.2).

mesh_tools

We use mesh_tools to visualize the mesh map with the mesh_msgs::MeshGeometryStamped ROS message. mesh_tools also incorporates navigation functions upon mesh map. Mesh tool introduction

Install mesh_tools by:

1. Install lvr2:

sudo apt-get install build-essential \
     cmake cmake-curses-gui libflann-dev \
     libgsl-dev libeigen3-dev libopenmpi-dev \
     openmpi-bin opencl-c-headers ocl-icd-opencl-dev \
     libboost-all-dev \
     freeglut3-dev libhdf5-dev qtbase5-dev \
     qt5-default libqt5opengl5-dev liblz4-dev \
     libopencv-dev libyaml-cpp-dev

In Ubuntu18.04, use libvtk6 because libvtk7 will conflict with pcl-ros in melodic.

sudo apt-get install  libvtk6-dev libvtk6-qt-dev

In Ubuntu 20.04,

sudo apt-get install  libvtk7-dev libvtk7-qt-dev

then:

cd a_non_ros_dir

build:

git clone https://github.com/uos/lvr2.git
cd lvr2 
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. && make
sudo make install

It may take you some time.

2. Install mesh_tools, (I can not install it from official ROS repos now, so I build it from source)

cd slamesh_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/naturerobots/mesh_tools.git
cd ..
rosdep update
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y
catkin_make
source devel/setup.bash

Clone this repository and build:

cd slamesh_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/RuanJY/SLAMesh.git
cd ..
catkin_make
source ~/slamesh_ws/src/devel/setup.bash

If you encounter some trouble with prerequisites, the problem may lay down on the prerequisite; we advise you to use our docker image:

docker pull pleaserun/rjy_slam_work:slamesh_18.04

After cloning the image, remember to run it with correct path of dataset via option -v, like:

docker run -it -p 5900:5900 -p 2222:22 -e RESOLUTION=1920x1080  \
-v path_in_your_PC:/root/dataset \
--name test_slamesh \
pleaserun/rjy_slam_work:slamesh_18.04

Then you can use VNC to enter a graphical interface via port 5900, or use ssh to connect container via port 2222.

Move to the dictionary slamesh_ws/src, and complete step after 2.1.

The dataset is available at KITTI dataset.

Set the parameter data_path in slamesh_kitti.launch to your folder of kitti dataset path

The file tree should be like this:

file_loc_dataset
    ├── 00
    |   └──velodyne
    |       ├── 000000.bin
    |       └── ...
    └──01   

For example, if you want to run the 07 sequence:

roslaunch slamesh slamesh_kitti_meshing.launch seq:=/07

You should get:

If you can not see the mesh, check that the Rviz plugin is sourced correctly. When mesh_visualization is disabled, only vertices are published as a point cloud.

The dataset is available at Mai City Dataset. Sequence 01 can be fed into SLAM and sequence 02 can be accumulated into a dense ground truth point cloud map.

Similarly, set the parameter data_path in slamesh_maicity.launch to your folder of the kitti dataset path.

roslaunch slamesh slamesh_maicity.launch seq:=/01

You should get:

roslaunch slamesh slamesh_online.launch

And play your bag, in launch file, remap the topic "/velodyne_points" to your LiDAR topic like "/os_cloud_node/points".

rosbag play your_bag.bag 

The number of LiDAR channels does not matter because our algorithm does not extract features.

You can use our sample data recorded with an Ouster OS1-32 LiDAR: SLAMesh dataset.

SLAMesh saves all its report to the path result_path. If you find ros warning: Can not open Report file, create the folder of result_path first, or just follow the steps below.

The file 0x_pred.txt is the KITTI format path. I use KITTI odometry evaluation tool for evaluation:

cd slamesh_ws
mkdir result && cd result
git clone https://github.com/LeoQLi/KITTI_odometry_evaluation_tool
cd KITTI_odometry_evaluation_tool/
python evaluation.py --result_dir=./data/ --eva_seqs=07.pred

Run SLAMesh by:

roslaunch slamesh slamesh_kitti_odometry.launch seq:=/07

Currently, the result on the KITTI odometry benchmark is:

Notice that to achieve better KITTI odometry performance, the parameter in slamesh_kitti_meshing.launch are set as followed:

full_cover: false # due to discontinuity phenomenon between cells, shirnk the test locations can improve accuracy.
num_margin_old_cell: 500 # margin old cells, because KITTI evaluate odometry accuracy rather than consistency.

However, if you want to have better meshing result, they should be: (in launch slamesh_kitti_meshing.launch)

full_cover: true # so that there is no gap between cells.
num_margin_old_cell: -1  # do not margin old cells, the cell-based map will have implicit loop closure effect.

To save the mesh map, in slamesh_node.cpp, function SLAMesher::process(), line 867, set variable save_mesh_map to true.

I use the TanksAndTemples/evaluation tool to evaluate the mesh. I slightly modify it (remove trajectory). You can find it here: TanksAndTemples/evaluation_rjy

Then compare the mesh with the ground-truth point cloud map:

cd TanksAndTemples_direct_rjy/python_toolbox/evaluation/
python run.py \
--dataset-dir ./data/ground_truth_point_cloud.ply \
--traj-path ./ \
--ply-path ./data/your_mesh.ply

***_report.txt record time cost and other logs.

TODO

Author: Jianyuan Ruan, Bo Li, Yibo Wang, Yuxiang Sun.

Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Most of the code are build from scratch , but we also want to acknowledge the following open-source projects:

TanksAndTemples/evaluation: evaluation

A-LOAM: kitti dataset loader and tic-toc

F-LOAM: help me to write the ceres residuals

VGICP: multi-thread