The installation of Cartographer

The installation of Cartographer

https://google-cartographer-ros.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration.html#lua-configuration-reference-documentation

Building & Installation

In order to build Cartographer ROS, we recommend using wstool and rosdep. For faster builds, we also recommend using Ninja.

On Ubuntu Focal with ROS Noetic use these commands to install the above tools:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y python3-wstool python3-rosdep ninja-build stow

On older distributions:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y python-wstool python-rosdep ninja-build stow

After the tools are installed, create a new cartographer_ros workspace in ‘catkin_ws’.

mkdir catkin_ws
cd catkin_ws
wstool init src
wstool merge -t src https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cartographer-project/cartographer_ros/master/cartographer_ros.rosinstall
wstool update -t src

Now you need to install cartographer_ros’ dependencies. First, we use rosdep to install the required packages. The command ‘sudo rosdep init’ will print an error if you have already executed it since installing ROS. This error can be ignored.

sudo rosdep init
rosdep update
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro=${ROS_DISTRO} -y

Cartographer uses the abseil-cpp library that needs to be manually installed using this script:

src/cartographer/scripts/install_abseil.sh
src/cartographer/scripts/install_proto3.sh

Due to conflicting versions you might need to uninstall the ROS abseil-cpp using

sudo apt-get remove ros-${ROS_DISTRO}-abseil-cpp

Build and install.

catkin_make_isolated --install --use-ninja

This builds Cartographer from the latest HEAD of the master branch. If you want a specific version, you need to change the version in the cartographer_ros.rosinstall.

Attention

Well, as it turns out that this dependency was added to the cartographer package roughly a week ago (as can be seen here https://github.com/cartographer-project/cartographer/pull/1875); removing the respective line from the package.xml and installing abseil via the command from the guide (ie. src/cartographer/scripts/install_abseil.sh) seems to have fixed the issue, atleast in so far as it allowed me to build and install cartographer ros.

ERROR: the following packages/stacks could not have their rosdep keys resolved to system dependencies: cartographer: [libabsl-dev] defined as "not available" for OS version [focal] 

The version of software

Here are some problems I met.

pip install Sphinx==1.7.9
pip install Jinja2==2.10
Eigen == 3.3.7
sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-pcl-conversions

google_carto_ws/src/.rosinstall

- git:
    local-name: cartographer
    uri: https://github.com/googlecartographer/cartographer.git
- git:
    local-name: cartographer_ros
    uri: https://github.com/googlecartographer/cartographer_ros.git
- git:
    local-name: ceres-solver
    uri: https://github.com/ceres-solver/ceres-solver.git
    version: 1.12.0rc4
- git:
    local-name: cartographer_turtlebot
    uri: https://github.com/googlecartographer/cartographer_turtlebot.git   
- git:
    local-name: cartographer_fetch
    uri: https://github.com/googlecartographer/cartographer_fetch.git  

google_carto_ws/src/cartographter_ros/cartographter_ros.rosinstall

- git: {local-name: cartographer, uri: 'https://github.com/googlecartographer/cartographer.git'}
- git: {local-name: cartographer_ros, uri: 'https://github.com/googlecartographer/cartographer_ros.git'}
- git: {local-name: ceres-solver, uri: 'https://ceres-solver.googlesource.com/ceres-solver.git', version: '1.12.0rc4'}
- git: {local-name: cartographer_turtlebot, uri: 'https://github.com/googlecartographer/cartographer_turtlebot.git'}
- git: {local-name: cartographer_fetch, uri: 'https://github.com/googlecartographer/cartographer_fetch.git'}