Hands-On ROS for Robotics Programming

SLAM concepts

SLAM allows the robot to build a map of the environment using the following two sources of information:

• Robot pose estimation, coming from the internal odometry (rotary encoders) and IMU sensor data
• Distance to objects, obstacles and walls, coming from distance sensors, the LDS in particular

In its most basic version, a map includes two-dimensional information, while in more advanced applications using industrial-grade LIDAR sensors, a richer map is built using three-dimensional information from LIDAR and/or from three-dimensional cameras. For the purpose of our learning path, we will deal with the two-dimensional OGM, also very common in ROS projects.