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The Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit (MRPT) |
1 Introduction
The Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit (MRPT) is an extensive, cross-platform, and open source C++ library aimed to help robotics researchers to design and implement algorithms (mainly) in the fields of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), computer vision, and motion planning (obstacle avoidance). The priorities are efficiency and reusability of code.
The libraries include classes for easily managing 3D(6D) geometry, probability density functions (pdfs) over many predefined variables (points and poses, landmarks, maps), Bayesian inference (Kalman filters, particle filters), image processing, path planning and obstacle avoidance, 3D visualization of all kind of maps (points, occupancy grids, landmarks,...), etc.
Gathering, manipulating and inspecting very large robotic datasets (Rawlogs) efficiently is another goal of MRPT, supported by several classes and applications.
A proper and up-to-date documentation is another of the major goals of MRPT developers. Currently there are dozens of examples and several single-topic tutorials. A currently on-going project is devoted to write a "MRPT book" tutorial.
The MRPT is free software and it is released under the GPL.
2 Overview
The MRPT project is organized as a set of individual libraries. The main one is libmrpt-core, dealing from low level OS-related issues to SLAM and Bayesian algorithms, and upon this one other libraries focus on more specific problems. There are also several libraries libmrpt-core relies on, some of them being integrated (built-in) and others are required to be preinstalled by the user.
An up-to-date list of hardware and robotic sensors currently supported by MRPT is maintained here.
The MRPT does not deal with the design of a robotic software architecture (communications, concurrency, etc...). For this aim we use the BABEL development system, which has integrated support for the MRPT. Other systems for this purpose are, for example, the Carnegie Mellon Robot Navigation Toolkit (CARMEN), the Player/Stage libraries, or the MOOS toolkit.
Some statistics: Currently (October 2008), the MRPT project comprises >1100 source files, and >420 KLOC.
3 Some Videos
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Robotic Wheelchair Navigation in the Malaga University (outdoor) |
Robot ICP SLAM + MCL. Sent by Fabian Menges (TU-Dresden). |
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Visualization of the ICP algorithm within RawLogViewer. |
ICP-SLAM showing evolution in a 3D view in real-time. |
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An example of the output from the kf-slam application for 6D-SLAM. |
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4 What's next?
There is a section for the "wishlist" and "to-do's" in MRPT.
