ORB_SLAM3 VS Kimera

Thank you for the recommendation. Other's I've talked to have also mentioned slam. I think I might use this repo that looks promising: https://github.com/UZ-SLAMLab/ORB_SLAM3

https://github.com/UZ-SLAMLab/ORB_SLAM3 looks promising. Thank you for the recommendation!

ORB_SLAM3 on GitHub: https://github.com/UZ-SLAMLab/ORB_SLAM3

Yeah pretty much. I'd say it can still be useful if your custom application only needs one or two new modules and can otherwise be formed from existing code. It's great if you make a lot of different systems with similar sub-modules. The bigger research institutions also open source a lot of their code with ROS integrations, so you can just drop in state of the art modules where appropriate. e.g. OrbSlam3,

You could try your luck with OrbSLAM3 or Kimera, they're pretty close to state of the art and open source. Might have a bit of a learning curve though.

I hear good things about stereo-visual + inertial and OrbSlam3 seems pretty hot, but this is a couple years old now and I'm not active enough in the field to give a definitive opinion.

I'm currently in the planning stage of building an indoor autonomous MAV/drone. Up until this point I thought this would require a SLAM solution, such as ORB-SLAM3, but now I see this framework by Intel which doesn't mention SLAM anywhere. All of the literature seems to be about SLAM so maybe I just don't know the terminology for what I'm looking for.

You could try your luck with OrbSLAM3 or Kimera, they're pretty close to state of the art and open source. Might have a bit of a learning curve though.

Kimera is the one SLAM algorithm that is probably most similar to what you are interested in because it deals with meshes. So the output reconstruction is a 3D mesh map.

Have a look at Kimera