A Guide for 3D Mapping with Low-Cost Sensors Using ROS

Abstract

Open source software and low-cost sensors bring unquestionable advantages to the robotics community, facilitating the access to a wide range of robotic applications to virtually anyone, and playing an important role in recent advances. With the progressive overthrown of the cost barrier, development of robotic solutions has become more widespread among our society, as witnessed by the increase of service robotic applications to consumers. Despite the ease of access to low-cost sensors nowadays, knowledge of sensor integration and robotics middleware is still imperative to design successful robotic solutions. In this tutorial chapter, we provide an educational guide that leverages open source tools, such as the Robot Operating System (ROS), and low-cost sensors, such as the Microsoft Kinect v2, to design a full 3D indoor Mapping system. The ultimate goal of the system is to create a comprehensive and detailed 3D map of any indoor environment. Besides going through all the key steps to setup such a system and presenting interactive results, we also provide an experimental dataset that we hope can be useful to the community in the future.