Writing Global Path Planners Plugins in ROS: A Tutorial

Abstract

In this tutorial chapter, we demonstrate how to integrate a new planner into ROS and present their benefits. Extensive experimentations are performed to show the effectiveness of the newly integrated planners as compared to Robot Operating System (ROS) default planners. The navigation stack of the ROS open-source middleware incorporates both global and local path planners to support ROS-enabled robot navigation. Only basic algorithms are defined for the global path planner including Dijkstra, A*, and carrot planners. However, more intelligent global planners have been defined in the literature but were not integrated in ROS distributions. This tutorial was developed under Ubuntu 12.4 and for ROS Hydro version. However, it is expected to also work with Groovy (not tested). A repository of the new path planner is available at https://github.com/coins-lab/relaxed_astar. A video tutorial also available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8UbFU8tzwRjkxccq2zLkmTkOOYela5fu.