byangw / PCT_planner

3D navigation based on point cloud tomography

PCT Planner

Overview

This is an implementation of paper Efficient Global Navigational Planning in 3D Structures based on Point Cloud Tomography (submitted to TMECH). It provides a highly efficient and extensible global navigation framework based on a tomographic understanding of the environment to navigate ground robots in multi-layer structures.

Demonstrations: pct_planner

Prerequisites

Environment

• Ubuntu >= 20.04
• ROS >= Noetic with ros-desktop-full installation
• CUDA >= 11.7

Python

• Python >= 3.8
• CuPy with CUDA >= 11.7
• Open3d

Build & Install

Inside the package, there are two modules: the point cloud tomography module for tomogram reconstruction (in tomography/) and the planner module for path planning and optimization (in planner/). You only need to build the planner module before use. In planner/, run build_thirdparty.sh first and then run build.sh.

cd planner/
./build_thirdparty.sh
./build.sh

Run Examples

Three example scenarios are provided: "Spiral", "Building", and "Plaza".

• "Spiral": A spiral overpass scenario released in the 3D2M planner.
• "Building": A multi-layer indoor scenario with various stairs, slopes, overhangs and obstacles.
• "Plaza": A complex outdoor plaza for repeated trajectory generation evaluation.

Tomogram Construction

To plan in a scenario, first you need to construct the scene tomogram using the pcd file.

• Unzip the pcd files in rsc/pcd/pcd_files.zip to rsc/pcd/.
• For scene "Spiral", you can download the pcd file from 3D2M planner spiral0.3_2.pcd.
• Run roscore, start RViz with the provided config (rsc/rviz/pct_ros.rviz).
• In tomography/scripts/, run tomography.py with the --scene argument:

cd tomography/scripts/
python3 tomography.py --scene Spiral

• The generated tomogram is visualized as ROS PointCloud2 message in RViz and saved in rsc/tomogram/.

Trajectory Generation

After the tomogram is constructed, you can run the trajectory generation example.

• In planner/scripts/, run plan.py with the --scene argument:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/YOUR/DIRECTORY/TO/PCT_planner/planner/lib/3rdparty/gtsam-4.1.1/install/lib
cd planner/scripts/
python3 plan.py --scene Spiral

• The generated trajectory is visualized as ROS Path message in RViz.

License

The source code is released under GPLv2 license.

For commercial use, please contact Bowen Yang [e-mail].