Advanced Mapping Robot and High-Resolution Dataset

TL;DR

This paper introduces a highly synchronized mapping robot equipped with multiple high-resolution sensors and provides new datasets for evaluating mapping algorithms, along with a comprehensive survey of existing robotics datasets.

Contribution

The paper presents a fully hardware synchronized mapping robot with high-resolution sensors and releases new datasets, along with a detailed survey of existing robotics datasets.

Findings

High-precision mapping achieved with synchronized sensors

Three new datasets collected for mapping evaluation

Survey of existing robotics datasets compiled

Abstract

This paper presents a fully hardware synchronized mapping robot with support for a hardware synchronized external tracking system, for super-precise timing and localization. Nine high-resolution cameras and two 32-beam 3D Lidars were used along with a professional, static 3D scanner for ground truth map collection. With all the sensors calibrated on the mapping robot, three datasets are collected to evaluate the performance of mapping algorithms within a room and between rooms. Based on these datasets we generate maps and trajectory data, which is then fed into evaluation algorithms. We provide the datasets for download and the mapping and evaluation procedures are made in a very easily reproducible manner for maximum comparability. We have also conducted a survey on available robotics-related datasets and compiled a big table with those datasets and a number of properties of them.