Tools for Visualizing, Annotating and Storing Triangle Meshes in ROS and RViz

Abstract

Polygonal maps for robotic applications are becoming increasingly popular, but are currently not effectively supported in the Robot Operating System (ROS). In this paper, we introduce the Mesh Tools package consisting of message definitions, RViz plugins and a persistence layer to make the benefits of annotated polygonal maps available in ROS. These tools allow to publish, edit and inspect such maps within the existing ROS context. Our persistence layer efficiently loads and stores large mesh maps. We discuss two application areas as a proof-of-concept: Labeling of triangle clusters for semantic mapping and robot navigation on triangle meshes in a typical outdoor environment by integrating our tools into an existing navigation stack.