Preparing your docker image

Data export

If your solution requires additional time to complete after the ros2 bag play finishes, for example to save the output map, you can extend the sigterm and sigkill timeouts for your ros2 node:

my_node = Node(
    sigterm_timeout="30",  # Wait 30 seconds before escalating to SIGTERM
    sigkill_timeout="5",  # Wait 5 more seconds before SIGKILL
    ...
    )

The evaluation pipeline is running ROS2 humble. Due to some limitations of this system, in order for your prepared docker image to exit correctly, please follow these:

• Use STOPSIGNAL SIGINT in your Dockerfile.
• Use the --noninteractive flag in your ros2 launch/run command, e.g.:

  ros2 launch --noninteractive my_package my_launch.py
  

To trigger on the sigterm signal, you can include a shutdown callback in your ROS2 code. For example:

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    rclcpp::init(argc, argv);


    auto node = std::make_shared<MyNode>();

    // Register shutdown callback on the global context
    auto context = rclcpp::contexts::get_global_default_context();

    // Use a weak pointer to avoid keeping the node alive
    std::weak_ptr<MyNode> weak_node = node;

    context->add_on_shutdown_callback(
        [weak_node]() {
            if (auto n = weak_node.lock()) {
                std::cout << "[mapper_node] Received a shut down call" << std::endl;
                n->saveMapOnShutdown();
                std::cout << "[mapper_node] Shutdown save completed" << std::endl;
            }
        });

    try {
        rclcpp::spin(node);
    } catch (const std::exception & e) {
        std::cout << "Exception: " << e.what();
    }

    rclcpp::shutdown();
    return 0;
}

Published topics

Your solution must publish on /estimated_odom, /estimated_pose or estimated_pose_covariance topics. Alternatively, if your solution performs optimization of the previously estimated poses, e.g. through graph optimization, you can also save the final estimated trajectory to a file. This file must follow the tum format and be saved to: $STORAGE_PATH/trajectory.txt.