2D ESDF Generation for Ground Based Robots

[Magnusgaertner]

Hi,

wouldn't it be nice to be able to generate only 2 dimensional esdf maps out of a 3D tsdf map, e.g. for ground based robots. The idea is to project several z-layers into one 2d representation, taking the minimum distance across all layers. This projection then acts as the input of the esdf.

The main motivation for this is to have a high resolution tsdf, but still be able to generate the esdf in real-time as the main bottleneck is the esdf propagation which is cubic in the original implementation but would then be quadratic.

Sure, one needs to:

• [ ] change the esdf integrator, merging tsdf voxels along the z axis
• [ ] change the neighborhood propagation scheme to 2d.
• [ ] change the distance and gradient computation

to do this I would add new types that implement that behavior.

This idea is not thought through completely, so I am happy to hear any suggestions on the implementation.

Best, Magnus

[maximilianwulf]

Hey @Magnusgaertner, I know a very nice library, it is called elevation_mapping. Have a look here: https://github.com/ANYbotics/elevation_mapping.