access normals from gridmap variable

[mcamurri]

I have a question: from the RViz I can see that the gridmap is visualized with some sort of normal to orient the cell/mesh. This means that for each cell a normal is computed. Is it available from the gridmap object or it is computed by the RViz plugin from the neighbors?

Is there a method to get the normals automatically?

[pfankhauser]

Hi @mcamurri,
We have implemented surface normal estimation as part of Elevation Mapping and as a Grid Map Filter in Traversability Estimation. We are planning to unify the implementation as a Grid Map Filter in this repo, but in the meanwhile you can use the other implementations.

[pfankhauser]

It's here! We have a new implementation for several grid map filters, including normal vector estimation. More info here.