Greetings!
We’re happy to announce our arc-tangent navigation node: move_basic
We are aware of the sophistication of move base, but we wanted something simple and easy to use on our robots that didn’t have the overhead of setting up and tuning. Our solution is move basic. It enables you to get simple navigation working quickly, without having to deal with the complexities of, planners, and costmaps.
Given a goal, move_basic will rotate to face it, drive towards it, and then rotate again to reach the final pose. If obstacles are detected by sonar or lidar, the robot will pause to avoid collision. Goals can be specified in the map frame (assuming localization is available), in the odom frame, or relative to the robot’s current position (base_link frame). It is known to work well with our robots and our previously announced fiducial-based navigation node.
We plan to extend it to enable planning and movement along pre-designated routes, to provide a more comprehensive navigation capability in complex environments.
The node was originally developed to support the Ubiquity Robotics robots, but will work with any differential drive ROS robot.
Have an issue, or a suggestion for improvement? Feel free open an issue or PR on the GitHub repo.
This software will be part of the robots that we will release via crowdfunding on indiegogo at 00:01 EST March 10th 2018 / 21:01 March 9th PST (only a few days from now).
The Ubiquity Robotics Team
https://ubiquityrobotics.com