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Multi-Robot SLAM with RTAB-Map: Recommended Approach for Beginners?

Open LIU-sm opened this issue 2 months ago • 1 comments

Hello Mathieu (and RTAB-Map team),

I'm a beginner learning SLAM and have been experimenting with RTAB-Map in Gazebo simulations using turtlebot3 and AprilTags. Now I'd like to extend this to multiple robots.

Could you advise on the recommended approach for multi-robot SLAM with RTAB-Map? Specifically:

  1. Can RTAB-Map process multiple robot streams in one instance by setting different robot_id values?

  2. Should I instead run separate RTAB-Map instances for each robot and merge maps online? If so, are there built-in tools for this? like using the multi-session?

  3. Or maybe RTAB-Map doesn't support multi-robots and I need to start with other CSLAM project?

  4. As a newcomer, which approach would you suggest for getting started with multi-robot SLAM?

I'm wondering if RTAB-Map can support a collaborative SLAM system out of the box, or if this requires significant custom development.

Thank you for your guidance and for maintaining this amazing project!

LIU-sm avatar Oct 09 '25 06:10 LIU-sm

  1. While RTAB-Map can merge maps of multiple robots offline, it doesn't track from which robot a node belongs. Merging multiple maps from multiple robots is then the same than merging multiples maps taken from the same robot.
  2. Right now, the way to merge maps from multiple robots with RTAB-Map is to run RTAB-Map on each robot independently, then merge the maps offline afterwards.
  3. I've seen some projects doing online multi-robot SLAM with RTAB-Map, see links below.
  4. I didn't touch much myself on online multi-robot SLAM, so not sure which approaches are easier to start with.

I hope supporting online multi-robot collaborative SLAM in the future, but as it is now, it doesn't out of the box. You would have to rely on external merging approaches that combine RTAB-Map outputs of many robots online.

Related posts:

  • http://official-rtab-map-forum.206.s1.nabble.com/Mapping-with-two-robots-td9736.html
  • http://official-rtab-map-forum.206.s1.nabble.com/Multi-robot-rtab-localization-pose-td9764.html

A popular github repo: https://github.com/MISTLab/Swarm-SLAM . Also just found this recent paper using RTAB-Map that could give an idea of recent state of the arts approaches in multi-robot online mapping.

matlabbe avatar Oct 11 '25 17:10 matlabbe