What is this.
I created this package:
To have a well-documented reference implementation of PL-ICP. If you are only interested in the core algorithm of PL-ICP, a separate concise implementation in C/Matlab/Ruby is available.
To have a trustworthy scan matcher to be used in the experiments for some papers on ICP covariance, the Cramer-Rao bound for range finders, and robot calibration. For batch experiments, it’s also useful that it’s pretty fast.
To have a collection of utilies for command line (UNIX-style) manipulation of laser data, and creating beautiful maps and animations.
In the package, there is also some other software: a Ruby wrapper for the C library, a Ruby and a Matlab implementation of the same algorithm. These are not usable as of now. Then, it’s also my repository for miscellaneous useful scripts.
What it is NOT: Note that this is not a full-featured SLAM solution: this only does pairwise scan-matching between scans – but it’s really good at it!
If you are looking for a more complete SLAM solution, please see the projects listed in the OpenSLAM page; in particular you can have a look at GMapping.
Many pointers to other SLAM software can be found on the pages of the Euron SLAM summer schools: 2002 (Stockholm), 2004 (Toulouse), 2006 (Oxford). Other related projects are Carmen and Stage.
2008-09-10: there is a severe bug in that version; please use repository
You can access the current version on a Subversion repository:
$ svn checkout https://svn.cds.caltech.edu/subversion/andrea/csmUse the username “guest” / password “guest”. This gives you read-only access. Mail me if you need write access.
Please see the manual contained in the package.