The Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit

The MAPIR team is proud to announce the release of MRPT 0.9.0, which represents a big restructuration of MRPT and comes with new features and many bugfixes. It can be downloaded here, and here is the complete changelog. The main page of the documentation now includes a graph with all the MRPT libraries.

This is the summarized list of important changes:

- New minor version number started (0.9.0) due to incompatible changes in the ABI and in some parts of the API (read below for "Important changes in the API").
- The previous  "mrpt-core" library has been split into several smaller libs for better modularity, less dependencies of user programs and faster recompiling.
- Compile/build: Support for MSVC 2010.
- Support for the 3D cameras SR3000/SR4000. See mrpt::hwdrivers::CSwissRanger3DCamera and this example.
- The library mrpt-htmslam is now part of public MRPT releases (I tried to also release hmt-slam-gui but it would delay for too long... still in SVN only for now).
- The program 'icp-slam', and mrpt::slam::CMetricMapBuilderICP, are now capable of handling two kinds of rawlogs: based on CSensoryFrame's (as usual), and the newest only containing CObservation's. Note however that ICP-SLAM now requires all odometry actions/observations to have a valid timestamp (very old datasets <=2007 would need to be fixed in RawlogViewer).
- An important conceptual milestone: New base class mrpt::utils::CObject created to unify the MRPT RTTI system, instead of loading everything on CSerializable (which is now a derived class of CObject). This allows taking advantage of MRPT's smart pointers without forcing to implement serialization. Existing user code should be not affected at all.
- Fixed critical bugs in rawlog-grabber and in 6D KF-SLAM (read below).
- MRPT now uses Google's unit test framework (gtest). Dozens of automated tests already exist to provide a robust, continuous checking of the health of MRPT core functionality.

As usual, feedback is welcome in the forums (http://www.mrpt.org/forum).

This new version will be shortly available in the official Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora repositories, for those that don't want to compile it manually.