Welcome to Project 3: Map My World! In this project you will create a 2D occupancy grid and 3D octomap from a simulated environment using your own robot with the RTAB-Map package.
RTAB-Map (Real-Time Appearance-Based Mapping) is a popular solution for SLAM to develop robots that can map environments in 3D. RTAB-Map has good speed and memory management, and it provides custom developed tools for information analysis. Most importantly, the quality of the documentation on ROS Wiki (http://wiki.ros.org/rtabmap_ros) is very high. Being able to leverage RTAB-Map with your own robots will lead to a solid foundation for mapping and localization well beyond this Nanodegree program.
For this project we will be using the rtabmap_ros package, which is a ROS wrapper (API) for interacting with RTAB-Map. Keep this in mind when looking at the relative documentation.