Cartographer Odometry?

Recently I was working on trying to use the Realsense T265 sensors as input for Google Cartographer.

While making the videos, the laptop kept losing connection to the rover: the jump in the first video was when I paused the recording after it lost connection, but forgot to resume after reconnecting. In the second video, I just kept the recording going throughout. Not sure why the connection kept dropping. Everything seemed to continue running on the rover once the laptop reconnected.

It seems that it the above videos are essentially comparisons between the default and the modified weights instead. Here are the settings that differed from Cartographer’s defaults:

After actually turning the odometry setting on, the terminal is blasted with familiar messages about extrapolating milliseconds into the future or past. It turns out since they were just warnings instead of errors, maps were still being published. But the maps look better with odometry off, and opening rviz shows an error:

However, before trying to have Cartographer use them as inputs, it was possible to visualize the odometry and IMU data over the map:

In the end, Cartographer still isn’t using any data from the T265, but some settings were changed that seem to prevent the rover from getting lost within its own map.

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