Recently, I asked a question about a boat project I wanted to make for sea and water use on this link. @ gbiggs directed me to this topic. I thank him. I will repeat the question I asked there. There he made suggestions for simulation environments such as VRX system and Maritime. I had examined them before.
My main goal is to make an obstacle aviodance system. Are there any open source navigation stacks that you can recommend for this? I know a stack like Nav2 that can work on indoor systems and has tested a GPS-based application on a rover (a type of autonomous mobile robot that works outdoors). Since Autoware is designed entirely for cars, it seems like it will take a long time to manipulate it. I wanted to go with Nav2 here, but I did not see any examples or projects that were worked on. I do not want to choose the wrong paths. I need to define the navigation structure (global and local planners, obstacle aviodance structure, localization, synchronous communication infrastructure between packages) precisely and clearly. Since I could not see any project or work, I wanted to write here (as a navigation stack). Thank you in advance for your help.
I’m part of the team that developed VRX. While it does have some limitations, it was developed for the use-case you describe, prototyping perception and navigation (with obstacle avoidance) solutions. @caguero led the charge to upstream some of the VRX work into GazeboSim as you see in Maritime.
I have not seen a generalized, mature navigation stack for outdoor/maritime applications. (Would love to hear other’s experiences.) We recently did a custom radar-based obstacle avoidance project for a large USV, but unfortunately the client has kept this internal for now. I also am aware that @rolker has done some of this on commercial vessels with project11.
You might also look at the RobotX teams from 2002. As part of the competition they submit a technical paper. The documentation provide clues as to how others have solved the problem.
Thank you for the information you provided @bsb808. I will examine the resources you mentioned. I will also talk about a technique I have done and achieved results with. As you said, I would love to hear other experiences on this subject. Have a nice day
Thanks for the mention @bsb808. We use Project11 here at the University of New Hampshire as a common framework capable of working on multiple types of ASVs. It was first developed on a CWorker-4, but has since been adapted to DriX and Seafloor System’s EchoBoat.
It currently runs on Noetic, but is being updated to work with ROS2 with plans of using NAV2.
