CISC849 S2011 HW2

For this assignment, due on Tuesday March 22, you will install and run the GMapping occupancy-grid SLAM package. GMapping is officially only supported on Linux, but it may be possible to compile on Mac or Windows, as the only real dependency seems to be Qt3. (I installed it on Ubuntu 10.04 after "sudo apt-get install qt3-dev-tools").

There are several tools provided in the package; these are explained in docs/Instructions.txt. The primary executable is gfs_simplegui. Run it on a dataset containing logged odometry and range data to bring up a GUI showing map creation.

Compatible datasets are in CARMEN format and are available here (among other places). These include the Intel and MIT results shown in class.

Turn in images of at least three maps created by GMapping. The output file produced by the SLAM algorithm can be converted to an occupancy grid image using gfs2img. Try playing with some of the parameters to gfs_simplegui (number of particles, update distance) to see how they affect the final product.