Hi All!
I’m Pedro Gonzalez, robotics engineer at Kiwibot.
I’m happy to announce that my recent work extending Nav2’s waypoint follower to support GPS inputs has now been merged into the stack! This comes together with a tutorial and package that covers some base principles on GPS, the process of setting up a GPS based localization system using robot_localization, and the key configuration changes in Nav2 for basic outdoors navigation. It also features an outdoors gazebo world and a GPS equipped turtlebot to help users get started quickly!
As demo applications, the tutorial package includes:
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An interactive waypoint follower that will take in clicks over a satellite picture on mapviz, and forward them as goals to the GPS waypoint follower, trying to mimic rviz’ goal pose interface:
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A simple waypoint logging tool and an interface for sending logged waypoints as navigation goals:
This tutorial should be a good starting point for setting up Nav2 on an outdoors robot, however users should keep in mind that GPS is just a means for providing global localization to the stack, and that all cartesian tools in Nav2 are still available for going past the GPS waypoint follower and building custom autonomy applications according to each use case like the ones running on our autonomous robots at Kiwibot, as you can see in the video below!
