Turtlebot Autonomous Exploration (3D)

Overview

This is an ROS implementation of infomation-theoretic exploration using turtlebot with a RGBD camera (e.g. Kinect). It is designed for autonomous mapping of indoor office-like environments (flat terrain). All the computation is performed on the turtlebot laptop and intermediate results can be viewed from remote PC. The output consist of both 2D and 3D Octomap (.ot) file and saved on the turtlebot laptop. Link to wiki page (where you can find a video example.).

If you find this package useful, please consider citing the follow paper:

• S. Bai, J. Wang, F. Chen, and B. Englot, “Information-Theoretic Exploration with Bayesian Optimization,” IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems(IROS), October 2016. PDF

How do I get set up?

Download from source:

my_catkin_workspace/src$ git clone 
my_catkin_workspace/src$ cd ..
my_catkin_workspace$ catkin_make

Configure Network:

Please follow the turtlebot network configuration to setup.

Running:

From Turtlebot:

$ roslaunch turtlebot_exploration_3d minimal_explo.launch
$ roslaunch turtlebot_exploration_3d turtlebot_gmapping.launch
$ rosrun turtlebot_exploration_3d turtlebot_exploration_3d

• note: The octomap will be saved to the place where you do the “rosrun”.

From Remote Server:

$ roslaunch turtlebot_exploration_3d exploration_rviz.launch

Authors

Shi Bai, Xiangyu Xu. RFAL (Robust Field Autonomy Lab), Stevens Institute of Technology.