SLAM Toolbox: The New Default SLAM Implementation for ROS2

Next Generation ROS
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Because you haven’t heard enough from me today…

Per discussions in the official ROS2 TSC Navigation working group (ros-planning/navigation2#1389), and this thread: Supporting / maintaining SLAM in ROS2 - input requested, Matt and I with input from the rest of the working group and navigation community have decided to make SLAM Toolbox the new default ROS2 SLAM implementation to ship with ROS2 and Navigation.

As part of this, we need to create more formality in process and maintainership moving forward to make sure its not a one-man show of Steve.

On this discussion, we need the following:

  • Additional maintainers with expressed interest and use of SLAM Toolbox. This should include at least 1 additional company using SLAM Toolbox and a member of OSRF with administration rights in case other maintainers are needing to be added due to maintainers abandoning the project.
  • Process around reviewing and merging pull requests and issue tickets
  • Process or consistency around the release cycles and careful not to break API or functionality after a distribution has been released
  • Adding additional testing capabilities for units and integration to increase the reliability of PRs behind builds and checking some basic math.
    Create tutorials and additional documentation about use and examples

See this ticket for continual followup https://github.com/SteveMacenski/slam_toolbox/issues/151.

If you are a user, want to be a user, or have thoughts, please don’t hesitate to reach out here, GitHub or via email. If you have interest in being a maintainer, even better!

Project link: https://github.com/SteveMacenski/slam_toolbox
ROSCon talk: https://vimeo.com/378682207

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I’d like to also mention there’s a new paper about it available: https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.02783 from the Journal of Open Source Software. If you use SLAM Toolbox or like my approach, please cite it in your works:

Macenski, S., Jambrecic I., “SLAM Toolbox: SLAM for the dynamic world”, Journal of Open Source Software, 6(61), 2783, 2021.

Macenski, S., “On Use of SLAM Toolbox, A fresh(er) look at mapping and localization for the dynamic world”, ROSCon 2019.

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