**4. The map registration system mapit**

There exist a number of toolkits that help with registering point clouds and process 3D data. Many of them are professional software products, often also provided from the manufacturer of a 3D LiDAR system. Also a number of Open Source projects exist, for instance, the 3D Toolkit (3DTK) [20, 21]. The 3DTK provides a number of state-of-the-art 6D SLAM algorithm for registering point cloud data as well as a large number of additional shape detection and visualization tools.

In contrast to this, mapit focuses more strongly on the registration workflow and the post-processing of map data, but it is not restricted only to point cloud data. In mapit, additional sensor cues could be associated with the 3D data. The key idea of mapit is to store the raw data and keep track of all algorithm steps over time.

### **4.1 Overview**

With mapit, we developed a 3D mapping framework<sup>2</sup> for managing and post-processing a wide range of sensor data, especially the point clouds from the exploration vehicle. The software is divided into components and is designed for extensibility. We describe the different fields below:
