Local Map Support

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Hello,

I’m using the ZED Mini camera on Jetson NX platform with ROS2 for a drone/quadcopter related project.
For this project we need the mapping functionality, which is used for the obstacle avoidance. However, the problem is that the mapping data is constantly growing, which makes the whole obstacle avoidance pipeline slower as the time goes.
What we ideally would like to have is the ability to compute and maintain the spatial mapping data only in some radius/bound box around the current drone location, to keep both the memory and computation load more or less constant during the flight.
Searching through SDK and ROS2 wrapper documentation we haven’t found any way to configure mapping in such a way. Is there a way to do this? If not, are there plans to implement such a feature?

Thank you in advance,
IC

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Hi @IzzyCoder
Welcome to the Stereolabs community.

The ZED SDK has no local mapping capability, so the ZED ROS2 Wrapper cannot publish a local map directly.
You can configure Nav2 in order to use the ZED point cloud as the source for one of the local map layers (e.g. Voxel Grid Layer, Obstacle Layer, STVL layer).

The SDK team is working hard to add new features to be used in robotics applications and in the near future we will provide advanced local mapping out of the shelf.

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Hi @Myzhar,

Thank you for the prompt response!
This is more or less what we are doing already. Great to know that the feature is being worked on!

Thanks again,
IC

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