Unitree G1
Bipedal humanoid robot by Unitree Robotics, designed as a compact research, development, and developer platform.
Applications
- Research
- Home Assistance
Cartographer is an open-source SLAM library developed at Google and published in October 2016 (Wolfgang Hess, Damon Kohler, Holger Rapp, Daniel Andor — ICRA 2016). It supports 2D and 3D pose-graph SLAM with a built-in Ceres Solver nonlinear optimization back-end (also Google). The goal: real-time operation on a single embedded GPU/CPU and high map accuracy. Apache 2.0 license.
The architecture has two levels: (1) local SLAM — submap building via scan matching with scan-to-submap matching (Real-Time Correlative Scan Matcher), (2) global SLAM — loop closure and pose graph optimization via Ceres Solver. In addition: branch-and-bound search for loop closure (deterministic, efficient), support for IMU (3D), wheel odometry, GPS, and landmark constraints. The ROS wrapper `cartographer_ros` is available for ROS 1 Noetic and ROS 2 (via community fork).
Reference deployments: Toyota HSR home robots, AGVs in Bosch factories, the Google Cartographer Backpack robot (for building mapping). Benchmarks: Deutsches Museum dataset (3D), Revo LDS (2D). A full base of tutorials in the ReadTheDocs documentation. After Wolfgang Hess moved to another project, maintenance is slow (community-maintained); the last official release is 1.0 from 2017, but the cartographer-project.github.io fork is still actively developed.
A Perception Stack encompasses the software layers that process data from cameras, LiDARs, IMUs, microphones, and other sensors in order to recognise the surrounding environment, perform localisation, detect and track objects, and interpret the scene. It is typically the first processing stage in an autonomous robot's data pipeline, feeding its outputs to planning and control stacks.
An API Library is a software package that exposes programmatic interfaces for communicating with a device, service, or system. In robotics it typically forms a lightweight integration layer built on top of the manufacturer's official API or an open-source project, abstracting low-level protocol details and providing language-native bindings (Python, C++, Java, etc.).
A family of open-source robotic perception libraries: Visual SLAM (ORB-SLAM, RTAB-Map), computer vision (OpenCV), point cloud processing (PCL, Open3D), detection and segmentation (YOLO, Detectron2).
Toyota HSR (Human Support Robot) — Toyota's home service robot uses Cartographer 2D in production. AGVs in Bosch factories and some BMW plants. Google Cartographer Backpack — an indoor building mapping system (Google Maps Indoor). Used in many open mobile robot stacks (TurtleBot 3/4, ROBOTIS OpenManipulator) and in RoboCup@Home competitions.
github.com/cartographer-project/cartographer ~7.7k★, ~2.2k forks. The seminal paper (Hess et al., ICRA 2016) has ~3000 citations. The active cartographer-project fork is maintained by the community after Wolfgang Hess left Google.
Bipedal humanoid robot by Unitree Robotics, designed as a compact research, development, and developer platform.
Unitree H1 is a full-size general-purpose humanoid robot (~180 cm, ~47 kg). Bipedal, 5 DOF per leg + 4 DOF per arm, 3.3 m/s walking speed, 360° perception via 3D LiDAR + depth camera, Unitree M107 PMSM joint motors with ~360 N·m peak knee torque. Standard compute: Intel Core i5/i7; optional NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX.
Boston Dynamics bipedal humanoid robot. The fully electric generation unveiled in 2024 succeeds the hydraulic Atlas that was retired after more than a decade of research.
Requires Ceres Solver ≥ 1.13, abseil-cpp, protobuf 3.x, Lua 5.2. Ubuntu 20.04 + ROS 1 Noetic or Ubuntu 22.04 + ROS 2 Humble (community fork).
License family: Permissive
First stable ROS 2 Humble port — maintained by the community fork (ros2/cartographer_ros).
ROS 1 Noetic / Ubuntu 20.04 support. Last official Google release.
ROS Melodic support, Ubuntu 18.04 fixes.
First stable production release. API freeze for submap formats and serialization.
ROS Kinetic support, performance optimizations for 3D scan matching.
First public open-source release. ICRA 2016 paper. 2D + 3D SLAM, cartographer_ros for ROS Indigo.
