Using Octree Maps and RGBD Cameras to Perform Mapping and A* Navigation

Ability to explore unknown environments and ability to successfully navigate in these environments are two key abilities of any truly autonomous mobile robot. In this article, an efficient implementation of mapping and navigation using only RGBD cameras is presented. The map created by Visual SLAM techniques is converted into Octree structure, and successful A* Navigation between two points in 3D is performed. The created mapping system is able to operate in real-time even on small mobile robot and can be easily extended with new state-of-the art techniques. Proposed way of octree encoding, due to its minimum storage requirements, enables efficient distribution of map between multiple robots over the network. Presented path-planning method with its optimizations runs in sufficient time even in higher resolution maps.