About Navigation

Added in version Jazzy: This section.

Warning

This topic is under construction and this might not even be its final form. Please feel free to open an issue if you spot any typos or other problems.

See also

Official documentation: https://docs.nav2.org

The concept of navigation is part of a wide range of robotics applications. It can usually be simply put as moving a robot from one pose to another. Although in our human experience such task can be trivially understood, formally transforming that into mathematical descriptions and their suitable implementation is far from trivial.

This section will cover a few navigation concepts, but it is not meant to be complete. Our interest is to use the existing navigation packages in ROS2, namely nav2, through custom-made nodes. The tools we have seen so far in ROS2 will allow us to understand and interact with nav2 packages.

Nonetheless, there are sizable tutorials dedicated exclusively to navigation. This will not be the case here. The focus will be on linking the concepts learned so far and showcasing how they can be combined to interact with existing packages from the community. Conceptually, interacting with existing packages should be easy. However, going beyond using existing examples will require, possibly, all the knowledge acquired in previous sections.

For illustrative purposes, we will also use the slam_toolbox, meant for simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM). Whenever a concept from SLAM coincides with a navigation topic, this will be highlighted. However, going into detail about SLAM is out of the scope of this tutorial.