Collecting Larg-Scale Robotic Datasets on a High-Speed Mobile Platform

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-speed mobile platform designed for large-scale outdoor robotic data collection, enabling the creation of extensive datasets for SLAM and other research.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel high-speed mobile platform for outdoor data collection, expanding capabilities beyond indoor datasets with a 10km dataset release.

Findings

Collected over 10km of outdoor data

Successfully integrated high-speed platform with multiple sensors

Published a large-scale outdoor robotic dataset

Abstract

Mobile robotics datasets are essential for research on robotics, for example for research on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Therefore the ShanghaiTech Mapping Robot was constructed, that features a multitude high-performance sensors and a 16-node cluster to collect all this data. That robot is based on a Clearpath Husky mobile base with a maximum speed of 1 meter per second. This is fine for indoor datasets, but to collect large-scale outdoor datasets a faster platform is needed. This system paper introduces our high-speed mobile platform for data collection. The mapping robot is secured on the rear-steered flatbed car with maximum field of view. Additionally two encoders collect odometry data from two of the car wheels and an external sensor plate houses a downlooking RGB and event camera. With this setup a dataset of more than 10km in the underground parking garage and the outside of our campus was collected and is published with this paper.