SLAM with an Ouster lidar and Google Cartographer
This is the moment you have been waiting for: building maps with hands-on experience using Cartographer and an Ouster lidar sensor!
An Ouster lidar was chosen for this hands-on example because it has a built-in IMU, which is needed to perform SLAM. This means that you don't need to purchase another sensor to provide the inertial data.
The example you will see is the offline processing of data collected from an Ouster sensor and is adapted from the work of Wil Selby. Please visit Wil Selby's website home page for more cool projects and ideas: https://www.wilselby.com/.
Selby also has a related project that performs the SLAM online (in real time) for a DIY driverless car in ROS: https://github.com/wilselby/diy_driverless_car_ROS.
Ouster sensor
You can learn more about the Ouster data format and usage of the sensor from the OS1 user guide:
https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Vision-and-Behavior-for-Self...