3D Navigation (navigation in uneven terrain)

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That's pretty neat! My hope is next year (or more realistically, the year after) I can really dedicate time to getting height map implementations in Nav2. My hope is to start branching out to having alternate controller/planner server options based on 3D voxel grids and height maps to offer the full gambit of options for full 3D, height, and 2D navigation. Its a hassle to port all the algorithms over to each, but at least the basis will be done.

Thanks Steve!, I came to the conclusion that using a full 3D representation is more useful in terms of scalability (e.g. if I were to extend navigation for flying robots) for my case. At the moment I am using Octomap, planners are mostly from OMPL so a collision check module to FCL-Octomap serves well for now. However, I have plans to add OpenVDB to speed up planners, I met few people who have integrated/refined OpenVDB as an environment representation. Namely vdb_mapping, you might take a look at them too.

I'll say that I won't plan to use OpenVDB in the future. Its a great piece of software, but the binaries have had SO many problems over the years, you just can't rely on them. For 20.04 for over a year you couldn't use the binaries due to a messed up compiler flag. Now in 22.04 there are issues with the version that someone decided to release. And since none of the releases are controlled by the OpenVDB people themselves, its a real struggle to get real issues dealt with.

There are a number of options now for sparse voxel representations, I'd probably look at another one. But definitely i wouldn't use Octomap, that's too old and slow at this point. But its a reasonable starting point for a research project in ROS given its history

Hi Fetullah! I was trying to install all deps and vox_nav as shown in your Getting started page. However, when executing colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DACADOS_WITH_QPOASES=ON -DACADO_CODE_IS_READY=ON -DWITH_IPOPT=true --packages-skip-regex archive --packages-skip vox_nav_control vox_nav_cupoch; \ right after source install/setup.bash I get an error in the librtabmap_core.so.0.20.18 reporting that there is an undefined reference to octomath::Pose6D::Pose6D(octomath::Pose6D const&), but I have been using RTABMap before and I had no issues... Do you know how to solve this?

HI!, I dont remember facing such issue, are you using source build of rtabmap or octomap?, it could be that different versions of octomap are installed. Please name the packages that are on your src directory, I will see whether I can reproduce the issue. You might want to open an issue or a new question for better track and documentation of the problem.

These are the packages I have:

ACADOtoolkit
gazebo_ros2_control
perception_pcl
ros2_control
rtabmap
TALTECH_RM3_ROS_PACKAGES casadi
ompl
RM3_gazebo
ros2_controllers
rtabmap_ros
vox_nav

Moreover I installed rtabmap with:

sudo apt install ros-foxy-rtabmap-ros

And Octomap with:

sudo apt-get install ros-foxy-octomap

You seem to already do source build of rtabmap_ros, you dont need to apt-get install it, you may remove that Debian installation of rtabmap_ros and use source build. I was able to build both rtabmap_ros and rtabmap with foxy-devel branches. I could not reproduce this issue, I have installed Debian octomap just as you.

Here my versions;

octomap;

  <version>1.9.8</version>

rtabmap_ros;

  <version>0.20.18</version>

You can check your versions with;

ros2 pkg xml octomap

Overall, my suggestion would be to remove Debian installation of rtabmap_ros, clean up your build workspace with ;

cd colcon_ws &&
rm -rf build/*

and try to build again.

Thanks mate! Problem solved! I will start working with it now.