Cartographer

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

7949 stars · 2342 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Cartographer is a C++ library that computes real-time simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in 2D and 3D from sensor streams such as LIDAR, IMU, and odometry, with an official ROS wrapper (cartographer_ros) for robot integration. The original repository is no longer actively maintained, with limited continued support handled through the ROS fork at ros2/cartographer.

Use cases

• real-time slam for a mobile robot
• build a 2d occupancy grid map from lidar scans
• 3d mapping from lidar and imu data
• localize a robot on a previously built map
• ros slam node for a laser scanner
• fuse odometry, imu, and lidar for pose estimation
• map an indoor environment in 3d

When to choose

• You need real-time 2D or 3D SLAM from LIDAR, IMU, and odometry within a ROS-based robot stack
• You want a mature, well-documented SLAM system under a permissive Apache-2.0 license
• You are on ROS 1/ROS 2 and can use the maintained fork's binary packages

When to avoid

• You need active upstream development, new features, or timely issue support - the project explicitly states it is no longer actively maintained
• You primarily need camera/visual SLAM rather than Cartographer's LIDAR-centric mapping
• You want a standalone GUI application instead of a C++ library and ROS nodes you integrate yourself

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

robotics robotics autonomous-vehicles cpp embedded slam lidar mapping localization ros sensor-fusion odometry imu point-clouds 2d-slam 3d-slam occupancy-grid linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="cartographer-project/cartographer")