UAV Platform for Real-time Indoor Mapping

SLAM enables Robots and UAVs to effectively understand unknown surroundings and estimate their own position within those environments. Recent advancements in 2D mapping have significantly increased its popularity for navigation tasks, primarily because it is easier to generate and requires less computational power compared to 3D mapping. This paper provides a comparison of two widely used ROS-based 2D SLAM libraries: Google Cartographer and Hector SLAM, deployed on a custom built UAV that uses 2D LiDAR, and finds Hector SLAM to be more feature rich as well as computationally efficient.