ORB-SLAM3 Extension: Real-Time Sparse Map to Occupancy Grid (.yaml/.pgm) for ROS 2 Navigation

[Harishma356]

Hi ,

I’m Harishma Prakash, an undergraduate from Chennai Institute of Technology, India.

I’ve extended ORB-SLAM3 to include a real-time occupancy grid generator. It takes the sparse 3D map and outputs a ROS 2-compatible .pgm and map.yaml automatically during SLAM execution — no extra commands needed.

GitHub Repository:

GitHub - Harishma356/ORBSLAM3-grid-mapper: This repository is a modified version of ORBSLAM3...

Key Features:

• Runs as a background thread inside ORB-SLAM3
• Generates .png, .pgm, and map.yaml during SLAM
• Uses voxel filtering + 2D convex hull + raycasting
• Generates ROS2 compatible maps

It’s still basic but functional. I would love to hear feedback or suggestions.
Thanks!

— Harishma Prakash

[smac]

This looks neat! Do you have any videos or example maps that this creates? That might help folks get interested and involved in your work!

[Harishma356]

Thank you! I have attached an example of the working with kitti dataset.

The below image is the attempt of creating occupancy grid using the generally used method of directly flattening the sparse map points to the 2D plane: