Flying with Cartographer: Adapting the Cartographer 3D Graph SLAM Stack for UAV Navigation
This work provides a domain-specific solution for UAV navigation, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new application.
The paper adapted the Cartographer 3D graph SLAM stack for UAV navigation by integrating it into a feedback control loop and using it to build OctoMaps for path planning and obstacle avoidance.
This paper describes an application of the Cartographer graph SLAM stack as a pose sensor in a UAV feedback control loop, with certain application-specific changes in the SLAM stack such as smoothing of the optimized pose. Pose estimation is performed by fusing 3D LiDAR/IMU-based proprioception with GPS position measurements by means of pose graph optimisation. Moreover, partial environment maps built from the LiDAR data (submaps) within the Cartographer SLAM stack are marshalled into OctoMap, an Octree-based voxel map implementation. The OctoMap is further used for navigation tasks such as path planning and obstacle avoidance.