Navigating with a differential drive rectangular robot [closed]
Currently we are using the Navfn global planner with the Trajectory_Rollout local planner on our differential-drive robot that is approximately 1 meter by 0.6 meters (with the center of the differential-drive being approximately 0.35 meters from the back of the robot). You can see a picture of our robot here:
So far we have had limited success with our path planning. At the moment we believe that our biggest problem is that the robot will attempt to keep its center point (the center of the wheelbase) on the global path at all times, and if it moves slightly off the path it will end up spinning (usually a multiple of 360 degrees) until it merges back onto the path where it left off with the correct heading. (We have already tried all suggestions from this thread those linked on the same page)
We have been reading old forum messages and we think that our problem may be that the Navfn planner does not give pose requirements to local goals, meaning that when we reach curves on our path the robot will come in with the wrong heading and start its spinning problem. We wanted to use the pose_follower based on dialogue from this archive but it gave no messages and didn’t move when we ran it. We also tried the sbpl_lattice_planner to no avail.
We are wondering whether or not a global/local planner has been developed that works well with rectangular shaped robots. From our experience and what we’ve read from other users with similarly shaped differential drive robots, tuning the parameters on our current planners is not enough to get a reliable solution. We looked at the development on the PR2 for cart pushing, but we were unsure if we should attempt to make our robot "look" like a smaller square robot pushing a similarly shaped square cart.
Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Here are our parameters that we're currently using:
