ORB_SLAM3 VS micro_ros_arduino

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.

As far as micro controllers go, it's possible to implement a ROS node on both a raspi pico and arduino that allows them to share data with higher level nodes. That said, these specific implementations are a feature of ROS2. Previously, under the the original ROS, microcontrollers were more treated as 2nd class citizens and relied on a rosserial interface node to communicate with the full network.

I recommend using the Arduino library for Micro-ROS. https://github.com/micro-ROS/micro_ros_arduino

MicroROS is a project to implement a complete ROS2 node in your microcontrollers. The experimental MicroROS Arduino branch extends Arduino programs with additional C/C++ headers for full ROS2 compatible message subscription and publication. Specifically, its provides as precompiled binaries that support specific Microcontrollers such as the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect or the Teensy 4.1. The list of natively supported ROS messages is impressive.

Hint: You may get some ideas on how everything works from https://github.com/micro-ROS/micro_ros_arduino/blob/foxy/extras/library_generation/library_generation.sh