Spatio-Temporal Voxel Layer

A ROS costmap plugin that uses OpenVDB to maintain a 3D voxel grid with temporal decay for obstacle persistence. Originally developed by Steve Macenski at Simbe Robotics, this fork is maintained by Bear Robotics.

Repository Structure

Package	Description
spatio_temporal_voxel_layer/	The STVL costmap plugin
multi_robot_public_msgs/	ROS message definitions used by STVL for multi-robot coordination
obstacle_detector_msgs/	ROS message definitions used by STVL for obstacle detection

Building

Prerequisites

• ROS Noetic
• OpenVDB (sudo apt-get install libopenvdb-dev)
• Eigen3 (sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev)
• PCL (sudo apt-get install libpcl-dev)

Build from Source

mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src
cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/bearrobotics/spatio_temporal_voxel_layer.git
cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin_make

Usage

Add the plugin to your costmap configuration:

plugins:
  - {name: stvl_layer, type: "spatio_temporal_voxel_layer/SpatioTemporalVoxelLayer"}

stvl_layer:
  enabled: true
  voxel_decay: 15
  decay_model: 0
  voxel_size: 0.05
  track_unknown_space: true
  mark_threshold: 0
  update_footprint_enabled: true
  combination_method: 1
  origin_z: 0.0
  publish_voxel_map: false
  transform_tolerance: 0.2
  mapping_mode: false
  observation_sources: rgbd1_mark rgbd1_clear

See spatio_temporal_voxel_layer/example/ for full configuration examples.

License

This project is licensed under the LGPL v2.1.

Citation

@article{doi:10.1177/1729881420910530,
    author = {Steve Macenski and David Tsai and Max Feinberg},
    title = {Spatio-temporal voxel layer: A view on robot perception for the dynamic world},
    journal = {International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems},
    volume = {17},
    number = {2},
    year = {2020},
    doi = {10.1177/1729881420910530}
}