Maintaining navigation_experimental

Navigation Stack
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The official maintainer for navigation_experimental is Dave Hershberger (hersh@willowgarage.com). Since he is A) No longer working on navigation and B) No longer at Willow Garage, its about time to transition the maintainership to someone else. If you are interested in maintaining some or all of the packages in the stack, please reply below.

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But his name is still Dave Hershberger, right? Otherwise all aspects of the maintainer line would have been false… :wink:

I would be interested in taking over maintainership of navigation_experimental. Like many other people, I’ve had my own fork of sbpl_lattice_planner for years, and it’s frustrating to see everyone fixing the same bugs over and over again in their forks. It would be great to have an official central repo again, and frequent releases as well. I think I can help with that.

My GitHub username is mintar.

To see what I’m getting myself into, I’ve spent the last couple of hours preparing and submitting a couple of PRs for navigation_experimental. With these PRs, the repo is almost ready to be released into kinetic.

The remaining outstanding things are:

  1. eband_local_planner is not catkinized
  2. twist_recovery and sbpl_recovery need to be updated to the new costmap_2d API (well, “new”… since Hydro)

Regarding the first point: There is an active fork of eband_local_planner from @joq et al. that has already been released into kinetic:

I would suggest to simply remove eband_local_planner from navigation_experimental, and keep the existing fork.

Regarding the second point: Perhaps it’s not a lot of work to convert them, but since I don’t use twist_recovery and sbpl_recovery myself (so I have no idea how to test them), and since nobody seems to have missed them since hydro, I would suggest excluding them from the release (for example, by adding a CATKIN_IGNORE file, so that catkin doesn’t pick them up). If somebody wants to revive them later, they can still make a pull request.

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Hi @DLu, I would be interested as well. My GitHub username is lakehanne.

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I have taken over maintainership of navigation_experimental and released it into indigo, kinetic, lunar and melodic. The binaries for indigo and kinetic are already available, the binaries for lunar and melodic will be part of the next sync.

The gem in this repo is undoubtedly sbpl_lattice_planner:

https://wiki.ros.org/sbpl_lattice_planner

Of this package alone, there were 14 different forks on GitHub that I could find, and the same bugs have been fixed many times over by several people. I have cherry-picked all relevant commits from those repos, so if you are maintaining or using any of those forks, consider switching back to navigation_experimental.

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Thanks for stepping up and putting in the work Martin!