Navigation with dynamic obstacles

[Ridhwanluthra]

Thank you so much for the explanation, it’s quite helpful.
I have a few follow up questions:

@smac

Do you want a local planner / controller or global planner that handles dynamic obstacles? Your list contains both which serve different reasons.

I would be working in a largely open space with few constrained areas that have restricted entry and exit points, my guess is that a global planner handling dynamic obstacles should be more robust, is that right?

@smac

I’ve gone into detail in other venues

It would be great if you could point me to some of those locations so that I can continue researching on those.

@smac

As you see, the main issue here is not in the planning algorithms, most of these already exist or would not be too difficult for someone to make, its in a generalized detection and tracking.

I do have a detection and tracking pipeline, so based on what you have mentioned my understanding/questions for each are:

1. I use any planner that can update trajectory in real time and I update the costmap according to the motion of the obstacle and use it directly. This seems like a decent approach since we have a slow moving UGV, we don’t really need to worry too much about the dynamic constraints but it may lead to sub-optimal trajectories if I not wrong?
2. Is there a kinodynamic global planner that can plan through space and time integrated into the ROS navigation stack already? I believe that sbpl dynamic planner would have fallen under this category.
3. Our current approach is to use MPC local planner since it creates the smoothest trajectory in uneven terrain but I could not find a way to get it to handle moving obstacles. Am I missing something?

@smac

But if this is something you would be interested in contributing to, I’d be happy to help steer you in the right direction if you’d be willing to keep this open source and integrate in with Nav2!

Yes @smac I would be glad to contribute to this. My questions regarding whether something of the sort exists directly integrated into ROS or not was mainly focused towards understanding if I can contribute this to the ROS community.