GTSAM Catkin

This package is a catkin wrapper around GTSAM.

Contact: Julian Nubert ([email protected]), Turcan Tuna ([email protected])

1 - Overview

If no GTSAM installation is present on the system, GTSAM_catkin is built by compiling the gtsam libraries within the catkin workspace. On a modern desktop computer this takes about 3 minutes. If a GTSAM installation exists on the system, this is used instead and wrapped as a catkin package automatically. The latter can be particularly useful if multiple workspaces with these packages are compiled on the computer, or GTSAM_catkin is intended for longer-term usage.

The places it will look for for GTSAM are

• ~/.local/ and
• /usr/local

If it does not find any GTSAM installation at these two places, it will automatically pull the raw files from GitHub and build it from source in your catkin workspace.

For an example on how to build GTSAM (locally) on your system, refer to this link.

2 - Automatic Compilation of GTSAM in Workspace

2.0 - Requirements

No additional requirements known at this point.

2.1 - GTSAM_catkin Compilation

Compilation of GTSAM_catkin is really straightforward. Make sure you have a catkin workspace with this repository:

git clone https://github.com/leggedrobotics/GTSAM_catkin.git

Then you can build the package in release mode.

catkin build GTSAM_catkin -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

As introduced before, the 3 compilation options are chosen automatically in the following order:

1. GTSAM is installed locally and the $GTSAM_DIR environment variable is pointing to the installation location. The success of this is indicated through the message INFO: Found manually set path to GTSAM. Using version located at (some user-specified location).
   • This can e.g. be done by setting export GTSAM_DIR=/home/nubertj/.local/lib/cmake/GTSAM/.
2. GTSAM is installed globally. Both of these options should compile within a few seconds.
3. If none of the before cases holds, GTSAM is automatically pulled locally and compiled inside the workspace.

3 - Usage of GTSAM_catkin in your project

Usage in your catkin project is then straightforward.

CMakeLists.txt

set(CATKIN_PACKAGE_DEPENDENCIES
  GTSAM_catkin
)
...
find_package(catkin REQUIRED COMPONENTS
  ${CATKIN_PACKAGE_DEPENDENCIES}
)
...

catkin_package(
  ...
  CATKIN_DEPENDS
    ${CATKIN_PACKAGE_DEPENDENCIES}
  DEPENDS 
)
...
include_directories(
  ${catkin_INCLUDE_DIRS}
  ...
)
...
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME}
  ${catkin_LIBRARIES}
  ...
)

An example of this can be seen in ./gtsam_catkin_example_project/CMakeLists.txt.

You can also build it by running:

catkin build gtsam_catkin_example_project

Code Usage

Headers from gtsam, gtsam_unstable, etc., can then be included as usual:

#include <gtsam/...>