[Nav2 WG] August 31, 2023

Navigation Working Group Meeting Minutes - August 31

Attendees:

  • Steve Macenski
  • Alexey Merzlyakov
  • Ryan Friedman
  • Awab Syed
  • Reza Kermani
  • Magda Skoczen
  • Josh Wallace

New people introduce themselves

  • Magda - join meeting + some questions
  • Reza - construction AMR company engineer

Topics

Announcements:

  • N/A

New additions of note:

  • Wait recovery now respects ROS time (Dexory)
  • New changes to Smac Planner complete to add new features for (1) additional search primitives (2) optional downsampling of cost heuristic representation and (3) quadratic cost functions. Testing would be appreciated in PR #3752
  • Humble fix for planner server lifecycle management

Ongoing:

New bugs of note:

Anything else?

  • Alexey link to ROS Developer’s Day talk:

Round Robbin (questions, comments, what youre working on, updates, etc)

  • Steve: Smac Planner remove zig-zags caused in Hybrid-A* due to angle quantization bin skipping (+ a bunch of new features!), creating ROSCon talk on MPPI controller
  • Alexey: Working on the WPF flaky tests (1) rclcpp action (2) controller prune issue (3) BT errors not being cleared out. Working on rclcpp::Rate
  • Awab: Nav and having problems without AMCL → answered questions.
  • Josh: Route server having problems with routing potentially, working on finding closest node
  • Magda: Interested in costmap pub/sub updates with questions, awesome!
  • Ryan: Got Nav2 working with Cartographer on a quadcopter, costmap issues took some time to work through. Working to move to Humble
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One thing from the title of Alexey’s talk icon I feel compelled to clarify is that the Nav2 Collision Monitor is not a certified safety system with any guarantee or remark about meeting any safety standards. It uses the same kinds of techniques as some certified systems, but it is a pure-software and uncertified solution and should not be interpreted as providing formal safety promises.

Just to make sure that this is abundantly clear :slight_smile: Its absolutely useful and a great addition to the stack for those without safety needs or without certifiable safety sensors to provide an additional monitor to prevent collision. There’s also been some work recently adding dynamic footprints for changing vehicles and a collision detector node which rather than impacting the robot’s state, publishes to a topic for use by another system to perform an action (e.g. trigger LEDs or ignore areas where the work-product is within the monitor zone, etc)

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