How to create an occupancy grid map

[PB_robotics]

I am using a LIDAR sensor (URG-04LX) to map an environment for DaNI 1.0 in LabVIEW Robotics 2010 module.  I want to create an occupancy grid map of the environment to use for path planning purposes. Can anyone provide me with any assistance. I have looked at the examples for path planning using the A* technique on an occupancy grid but I don't understand how to create the occupancy map.

[Pete.Dunc]

The occupancy grid is created using the Occupancy Grid Map VIs.  Is it the use of these functions you would like to investigate?

As for generating or calculating the grid coefficients themselves, I do not have the relevant expertise.  A quick look at the Wikipedia page gives the theoretical background but mapping that to individual LIDAR readings is something I am unsure of.

Have you found any possible leads up to this point?

[PB_robotics]

I haven't found any leads as yet on how to create an occupancy grid map from LIDAR data. Yes I would like to investigate the functions to help me understand how to create the map.

[Pete.Dunc]

The occupancy grid map is an array of probabilities as to whether an obstacle is located in a certain 'cell'.  There appears to be multiple models of computing this, including the Bayes filter.  Further to that there are several scholerary articles however they appear to be more theoretical - do you have any support or expertise in your organisation which you could draw upon?

If you would like to understand the functionality of the Occupancy Grid functions then please have a look through the help file linked previously.  This also points to examples in the LabVIEW Example Finder (Help » Find Examples...) which show their implementation.

[zhoudeng]

i know how to manually creat a voronoi map now. the block diagram of the voronoi map building program is not accessible as the labview 2010 is a free trial version. I found one program from a very post which sort of helped me to build a map of my own using voronoi.

[codealumni]

Hi,

Like you, I am trying to use the Occupancy Grid Map vi to build a map from my LIDAR data and like you, I have no luck with it so far 😞 The occupancy map shipping examples showed the loading of known map, but I don't quite know how to extract data from LIDAR to feed it into the occupancy map. This example is great in demonstrating the way to convert the map into a form that the Create Occupancy Grid Map.vi but again, I'm at a loss when it comes to updating my matrix with data from LIDAR.

Would anyone be able to assist?

A little about what I'm trying to do - I am trying to build an autonomous robot which is going to roam about on a black & white checkered floor (with known boundaries) and avoiding obstacles while he gets to the specified known Goal Position. So my robot has a start and end goal position, and I have been reading a lot on SLAM for mapping but I stumbled upon Occupancy Grid Map vi in LabVIEW and I think that would suffice (for creating map as the robot roams about, detecting & avoiding obstacles). Am I right in heading that direction? 

I would appreciate any feedback or advices provided. Many thanks in advance.

Cheers!

[Sentinal_Bais]

... everyone above as told you how to create and LABVIEW occupancy map.... using an occupancy map.

The labview VI assumes you know exactly what the envrioment is like. Meaning you pretty much have some representation of the enviroment.

What you want to know is how do I generate and occupancy map using a laserscanner. For this you would need something called SLAM. Simultaneous localisation and Mapping. In order generate an occupancy map you need to continously localise your system so you can map laser measurements with refference to a fixed refferece frame, you then have to localise with respect to your map and repeat. This is non-trivial !

unfortuently there is no LabviewVi to do this for you, and there is not much working example code. So honestly if you want to do this, i would use a robotic development framework call ROS and using gmapping (which is a SLAM package). Alternatively if you inist on using labview you could create a dll of the gmapping (open source libary) and call it from labview, Our you could try to implement it from scratch yourself....

I just wish it was easier to use opensource libaries like pcl,opencv and integrate with textbased langauges using a labview system... it would make labview so much better, but labview robotics i feels is not really a good robotic application framework comapared to alternatives like ROS which have much bigger communities and much more modules of code you can use... escpecially for SLAM 

https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-22790 this is the best i have managed to find ( they do implement SLAM for this) 

http://www.ros.org/wiki/gmapping

[RODRIGOSUMEDHA]

hi did you find how to make occupancy grid using lidar data

[abhisheksk13]

hi im having some issues with DaNI 1.0 and lidar can u pls send me your labview block code for verifying with mine??