ROS Ceres Tutorials

A few simple tutorial examples of nonlinear least squares problems using Ceres, with 3D visualization using ROS.

Installation

This repo is a ROS package and should be built using ROS. It has been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 with ROS Noetic and Ceres 2.0.0. To build the ROS package, create a Catkin workspace with a source directory, clone this repo into the src directory, and build the workspace by running the following in a terminal.

$ mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws_ceres_tutorials/src/
$ cd ~/catkin_ws_ceres_tutorials/src/
$ git clone https://github.com/mitchellcohen3/ceres_ros_tutorial.git
$ cd ..
$ catkin build

Running the bundle adjustment example

For now, the only example implemented is a simple bundle adjustment example where we wish to estimate robot poses and landmark positions, given relative position measurements between the poses and the landmarks. To run the bundle adjustment example, first launch the visualization by running the follwoing from the root of the workspace.

source devel/setup.bash
roslaunch ceres_ros_tutorial bundle_adjustment_rviz.launch

Then, in a separate terminal, launch the executable by navigating to the directory devel/lib/ceres_ros_tutorial/ and run

$ ./simple_ba_example

The visualizer should show the initial guess and final result from Ceres.