Request for Technical Overview and Beginner's Guide to RTAB-Map Architecture

[cibi-p]

I'm new to SLAM and want to learn RTAB-Map's core structure. Could you point me to resources explaining its main blocks (sensor input, odometry, loop closure, graph optimization, 3D map) and how they work? Any beginner guides or diagrams would be great.

Thanks in advance

[matlabbe]

I'll suggest to start with this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06341

The code follows the main blocks, though we don't have diagrams of the current state of the code classes and inter-connections. The examples and demos were created more from an user's perspective than a developer's perspective.
https://github.com/introlab/rtabmap_ros/tree/ros2/rtabmap_demos#rtabmap_demos
https://github.com/introlab/rtabmap_ros/tree/ros2/rtabmap_examples/launch

There is also the ROS1 documentation explaining the interface of each node (which is the same interface than on ROS2).
http://wiki.ros.org/rtabmap_ros (by clicking each sub module at the top)

[cibi-p]

Thanks @matlabbe