OctoMaps, anyone?

[Michael Wimble]

No, not the location of octopi in the local Bay Area. I’ve always wondered by OctoMaps aren’t used for obstacle avoidance algorithms. I’m not sure I fully understand them as I haven’t written code to try to use them, but it seems like an ideal way to quickly search for where obstacles are. If I understand, I can quickly look at the 8 octants around the robot and get an idea of how far away the closest obstacle is without a laborious depth map search. Then, I can choose just the octants that have obstacles within a distance of interest and look at the sub 8 octants within each of those octants. Right?

Has anyone used OctoMaps? I think they are easily produced in ROS. Your thoughts and pra…, I mean your thoughs and suggestions are welcome.