Move Base Flex released!

Finally, it’s here!

We (@spuetz, @corot) have released Move Base Flex (MBF) in both Kinetic and Lunar. We introduced MBF last year at ROSCON as a backwards-compatible replacement for move_base (video available here).

Short reminder of the key features:

  • exposes action servers for planning, controlling and recovering plus access to the costmaps, allowing an external executive to implement smarter navigation strategies
  • abstracts a generic navigation framework that can be easily extended into particular implementations (in our implementation move_base is just an specialization of this abstract framework)

We are still actively developing it, so expect significant changes on incoming releases. But the basic ROS and plugins APIs are (we hope) frozen or at least won’t change significantly (and we will in any case properly document any needed porting)

For newcomers, we provide a simple executive using SMACH as a tutorial (video), but more advanced tutorials will come.

Hope you will enjoy composing your clever navigation strategies, and please tell us if you have comments, critics, wanted features…

Resources:

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Great news! Can’t wait to explore it! Thank you for sharing.

Great!!! I was impressed with your presentation last year.
I am delighted that you are offering this software as a binary.
I will try your MBF package soon. Thank you for your hard work. :slight_smile:

I was taking part in Robocup Germany last month where I had a conversation with an employee from Magazino about their navigation packages and he mentioned Move Base Flex!

So excited to test this on our robot!