학술논문

OctoMap-RT: Fast Probabilistic Volumetric Mapping Using Ray-Tracing GPUs
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE. 8(9):5696-5703 Sep, 2023
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Graphics processing units
Ray tracing
Octrees
Robot sensing systems
Three-dimensional displays
Task analysis
Probabilistic logic
Mapping
simulation and animation
hardware -software integration in robotics
Language
ISSN
2377-3766
2377-3774
Abstract
A 3D occupancy map that is accurately modeled after real-world environments is essential for reliably performing robotic tasks. Probabilistic volumetric mapping (PVM) is a well-known environment mapping method using volumetric voxel grids that represent the probability of occupancy. The main bottleneck of current CPU-based PVM, such as OctoMap, is determining voxel grids with occupied and free states using ray-shooting. In this letter, we propose an octree-based PVM, called OctoMap-RT, using a hybrid of off-the-shelf ray-tracing GPUs and CPUs to substantially improve CPU-based PVM. OctoMap-RT employs massively parallel ray-shooting using GPUs to generate occupied and free voxel grids and to update their occupancy states in parallel, and it exploits CPUs to restructure the PVM using the updated voxels. Our experiments using various large-scale real-world benchmarking environments with dense and high-resolution sensor measurements demonstrate that OctoMap-RT builds maps up to 41.2 times faster than OctoMap and 9.3 times faster than the recent SuperRay CPU implementation. Moreover, OctoMap-RT constructs a map with 0.52% higher accuracy, in terms of the number of occupancy grids, than both OctoMap and SuperRay.