Autonomous Navigation

Posted by g.bartoli on Oct 28, 2015; 4:18pm
URL: http://official-rtab-map-forum.206.s1.nabble.com/Autonomous-Navigation-tp801.html

Hi Mathieu,
sorry again for all these questions, I'm a beginner with ROS and actually I'm learning it using rtabmap in this project, so I just need some directions on how to proceed, I'll do the rest all by myself... you're very kind to take the time to illustrate your system on this forum! :)

On our checklist, before eventually working on improving final accuracy, the next thing to do now is to try the autonomous navigation inside an already mapped environment. We would like to improve our "localization.launch" to add the possibility to make the robot going from one place to another computing the shortest path and dynamically avoiding obstacles.

Actually, the robot is equipped with wheel odometry and Asus Xtion without laser rangefinder, so we are in this configuration. Instead of "depthimage_to_laserscan", I'm using directly the "gen_scan" parameter to extract the fake laser scan from the RGBD sensor and this is correctly shown in rtabmapviz with a cyan line running along the walls and accumulating together with the map point cloud.

1) Is "gen_map" option sufficient for providing the "grid_map" topic?
2) Regarding the data needed by the navigation stack, what is the difference between using "grid_map" or "proj_map"? Can just the second one be used?
3) If we want to setup the whole navigation stack (global_costmap, local_costmap, point_cloud, etc...), is our current rtabmap configuration and an adaptation of this launch file for our hardware all that is needed or do we have to spawn other nodes?

Many thanks,
Guido