icra2018/nanomap_ros repository overview

⁠NanoMap

⁠Fast, Uncertainty-Aware Proximity Queries with Lazy Search of Local 3D Data

NanoMap is an algorithm and data structure that enables uncertainty-aware proximity queries for planning.

• video description⁠

⁠Features

Key features of NanoMap include:

• Incorporates frame-specific uncertainty (due to modeled local pose uncertainty) returned along with query point
• Query algorithm returns k-nearest-neighbors from most recent view of query point
• Updates pose history information 2-4 orders of magnitude faster than fusion-based voxel packages
• Particularly fast for low amounts of queries (<10,000)

⁠Quickstart

	git clone https://github.com/peteflorence/nanomap_ros.git
	catkin_make  ## catkin build for catkin_tools, or catkin_make for catkin

Reccomend first testing your installation:

	catkin_make run_tests_nanomap_ros

Then there are two examples of minimal nodes, one is for benchmarking and performs queries:

	rosrun nanomap_ros benchmarking_node

The other shows how to use the nanomap_visualizer:

	rosrun nanomap_ros visualization_node

⁠Support

This ros node has been tested on:

• ROS Kinetic on Ubuntu 16.04
• ROS Indigo on Ubuntu 14.04

⁠Benchmarking

NanoMap is particularly fast for low amounts of motion planning queries (< ~10,000), due to its low data structure build time. Fusion-based voxel structures take longer to build but have faster query times, causing them to be faster for > ~10,000 queries.

Nanomap is two to four orders of magnitude faster than these other benchmarked packages at rebuilding its data structure upon receiving updated pose history information.

(On single-core of an Intel Skylake i7. Error bars are shown as standard error of the mean. Docker image with all packages buildable inside provided: https://hub.docker.com/r/flamitdraper/mapping/⁠ )

⁠Required Dependencies

• Nanoflann (included as nanoflann_two.hpp)
• Eigen
• PCL

The PCL dependency is minimal. It only uses the pcl::PointCloud<pcl::PointXYZ>; does not use any algorithms. It would not be hard to replicate this type and remove the PCL dependency. Would gladly merge that PR, PCL is a fantastic library, but is not really used here.

⁠Without ROS

The core of the code has no depdency on ROS. The only parts that have ROS dependencies are the visualization components, and the example node:

• nanomap_visualizer.h / .cc
• frustum_visualization.h
• benchmarking_node.cpp

I have provided this as a ros package since that is how it has been used and tested. If you would like to use this without ros, it would just need a ros-independent CMakeLists.txt / incorporate into other build system.

⁠Testing

    catkin_make run_tests_nanomap_ros 

⁠Debugging NanoMap

The top of nanomap_types.h has #define NANOMAP_DEBUG_PRINT false. Changing this to true turns on potentially useful debug prints.

A particularly useful debug print is in NanoMapDebugPrintState() in nanomap.cc. Often I will turn the first line of this function to if (1) in order to print regular status.

⁠Contributors

• Pete Florence⁠
• John Carter⁠
• Jake Ware⁠
• Russ Tedrake⁠

⁠Contact

Contact [email protected]⁠ / peteflorence.com⁠ for more information.

⁠How to Run with Docker

⁠Linux

Tested on Ubuntu 16.04.6 with Docker 18.06.1-ce.

1. Open a terminal and run the command:

docker run --rm -p 8888:8888 icra2018/nanomap_ros:latest

1. Run a web browser and open the link: http://localhost:8888/lab/tree/README.ipynb⁠