Multiple Robot / Collaborative Mapping

[Eugene Rush]

Hello All,

I am new to using OctoMap, and would like to ask if anyone has any experience with building a map from multiple robots. 

I would like to pass map updates between robots, such that each robot sends its map updates to all other robots, and each robot receives map updates from all the other robots. I will first implement this by assuming there is no map error, and simply merging maps via a union or averaging. Eventually, I will consider iterative closest point algorithms to obtain optimal map fusion. I am using ROS Melodic on Lubuntu 18.04.

I do not have any particular question as of right now, but more curious if anyone has does this before and could share any useful references or personal wisdom. Specifically, I am currently trying to figure out how to pass data back and forth and create a ROS topic that can pull from multiple map updates from multiple robots.

Thanks,

Gene