Getting SLAMBench to work

Today I’m trying to get SLAMBench 3 to work. It needed some modifications.

I’m working on a fairly fresh install (not too many packages installed through apt) of Ubuntu 18.04. After cloning, I had to do the following steps:

1. Start by downloading the dependencies. When that is done, download the required datasets. This is the command I used:

   $ make deps;
   $ ### EuRoC MAV Machine Hall
   $ make ./datasets/EuRoCMAV/machine_hall/MH_01_easy/MH_01_easy.slam;
   $ make ./datasets/EuRoCMAV/machine_hall/MH_02_easy/MH_02_easy.slam;
   $ make ./datasets/EuRoCMAV/machine_hall/MH_03_medium/MH_03_medium.slam;
   $ make ./datasets/EuRoCMAV/machine_hall/MH_04_difficult/MH_04_difficult.slam;
   $ make ./datasets/EuRoCMAV/machine_hall/MH_05_difficult/MH_05_difficult.slam;
   $ ### EuRoC MAV Vicon Room
   $ make ./datasets/EuRoCMAV/vicon_room1/V1_01_easy/V1_01_easy.slam;
   $ make ./datasets/EuRoCMAV/vicon_room1/V1_02_medium/V1_02_medium.slam;
   $ make ./datasets/EuRoCMAV/vicon_room1/V1_03_difficult/V1_03_difficult.slam;
   $ make ./datasets/EuRoCMAV/vicon_room2/V2_01_easy/V2_01_easy.slam;
   $ make ./datasets/EuRoCMAV/vicon_room2/V2_02_medium/V2_02_medium.slam;
   $ make ./datasets/EuRoCMAV/vicon_room2/V2_03_difficult/V2_03_difficult.slam;
   

   This will take quite some time. In the meantime, continue with the below steps. After make deps is finished, you can use make datasetslist to see all available datasets.

2. Fix a small bug in the CMakeLists.txt file. The CMAKE_MODULE_PATH variable is not set, because the authors have used MESSAGE() to do that, instead of SET(). I will make a small pull request for this. Change line line 9 from:

   MESSAGE(STATUS CMAKE_MODULE_PATH=${CMAKE_MODULE_PATH})
   

   to:

   SET(CMAKE_MODULE_PATH ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/cmake_modules/)
   

3. Fixing pre-compile errors. I went through the list of libraries that are not found in the process. If it’s only a apt install LIBNAME, I will not describe it here. Libraries that needed a bit more work to get them to work:
   • PAPI: libsensors.so is not present. Do:

     $ cd /usr/lib/<YOUR ARCHITECTURE>
     $ sudo ln -s libsensors.so.4 libsensors.so
     

   • CUDA: On my system with an NVIDIA GPU and driver, I had to install nvidia-cuda-toolkit through apt.
   • OpenCL: Related to CUDA, I had to install ocl-icd-opencl-dev and libpoclu-dev through apt.
   • Ensenso: I downloaded the latest .deb from the Ensenso website and installed it.
   • David SDK: I have not tried to fix this. It probably requires this modified copy of the official David SDK. You still need a copy of the official David SDK which costs money.
   • DSSDK: This probably refers to the SDK of Sony’s DepthSense. I don’t have access to that.
   • The following warnings are generated from the hardcoded configuration for the PCL cmake config. I ignored them.

     ** WARNING ** io features related to dssdk will be disabled
     ** WARNING ** io features related to pcap will be disabled
     ** WARNING ** io features related to png will be disabled
     

   • VTK: Two VTK related files could not be found. I created symlinks to them:

     $ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/vtk/libvtkRenderingPythonTkWidgets.x86_64-linux-gnu.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libvtkRenderingPythonTkWidgets.so
     $ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/vtk6 /usr/bin/vtk
     

   • RSSDK: Installing the RealSense SDK did not resolve this message!!! What I did what didn’t help is: This probably refers to the RealSense SDK. I installed it by following the steps from the Intel RealSense SDK website:

     $ echo "deb http://realsense-hw-public.s3.amazonaws.com/Debian/apt-repo $(lsb_release --short --codename) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/realsense-public.list
     $ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key 6F3EFCDE 
     $ sudo apt update
     $ sudo apt install -y librealsense2-dkms librealsense2-utils librealsense2-dev
     

4. Fixing compile errors.
   • in slambench3/framework/tools/accuracy-tools/pointcloud_aligner.cpp, both HAVE_OPENNI and HAVE_OPENNI2 need to be undefd:

     $ sed -i "s/^#undef HAVE_OPENNI$/&\n#undef HAVE_OPENNI2/" slambench3/framework/tools/accuracy-tools/pointcloud_aligner.cpp 
     

   • During compilation, the compiler links libpapi.a, which does not contain all symbol definitions. To fix it, only link to the .so file. In slambench3/cmake_modules/FindPAPI.cmake, remove libpapi.a from the find_library(PAPI_LIBRARY ...) command:

     $ sed -i "s/\<libpapi.a\>//" slambench3/cmake_modules/FindPAPI.cmake
     

5. Start compilation. When make deps from the first step is finished, build slambench with the required algorithms. From the Slambench3 repository root directory, run

   $ make slambench APPS=orbslam2 -j
   

6. Now I can use Slambench3 on Ubuntu 18.04.

On my first run of

$ ./build/bin/benchmark_loader -i datasets/EuRoCMAV/vicon_room1/V1_01_easy/V1_01_easy.slam -load build/lib/liborgslam2-original-library.so -o output.log

the output indicated that ORB-SLAM did not report any changes in X/Y/Z until frame 831 (after 41.5 s(?) passed). Not sure why though. Running ./build/bin/pangolin_loader with the same arguments did not show the camera moving during the process. Something new to figure out tomorrow!