Hi there - your friendly neighborhood navigator here with some more exciting news!
Row Coverage Navigator, Server, Behavior Tree, and Demo!
In close partnership with Bonsai Robotics , there is a brand new, major feature available to the ROS Community! Row Coverage Navigator, Server, Behavior Tree, and Demo!
As opposed to the previous Complete Coverage project announcement last month, this project takes in a pre-computed set of rows based on existing crop locations, teach-and-repeat style from previous sessions, or where the rows are predefined by physical constraints (like trees). It then can use the same tools to compute routes to over the coverage pattern and paths between them!
You can see in the great demo video above that this breaks any assumptions about regularity of the coverage pattern. They can be crooked, unevenly spaced, or even be stored in file out of order!
This server it built using the fabulous Fields2Cover library enabling modular coverage algorithms to be composed for a complete application for the route and path planning using the given swaths.
This video shows a full simulation where:
- The navigation system is brought up without a planner server at all, only the row coverage server
- The CoverageNavigator is invoked using a nav2_simple_commander style API to perform a navigation task for complete coverage of a given field
- The BT XML is configured to call the coverage server and then naively provide the path to the Controller Server running the RPP controller. This uses new BT nodes for the Coverage Server also included in this work!
- And presto!
Even better yet, its drop-in API replacable with the Field-Polygon-based Coverage Server so you can swap them out without any modifications to your application software!
It has 90%+ unit test coverage and great documentation you can see in the repo below! Documentation on Coverage Server — Nav2 1.0.0 documentation available now!
A huge shout out and thanks to Bonsai Robotics for funding the development of this work and allowing Open Navigation to open-source it for the entire community to benefit from.
PS They’re Hiring! and I’m not, so go with them
Check out the project below: