Can i Use navigation stack if my robot does not have any laser or kinect type camera

Question

currently I am working on a project which is as following. 1-a camera is mounted on cieling of my room 2- image processing is used to localize the robot(using ar alvar track package) and obstacles. 3- path planning is done using A* algorithm i am done with all that is mentioned above. Now i want my robot to follow the planned path. but according to the description of Navigation stack package, you must need a Laser sensor for sensor stream input... Is there anyway to use this package for my project or is there any other solution for tracking of my robot

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Originally posted by Sufyan on ROS Answers with karma: 17 on 2018-08-08

Post score: 0

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Original comments

Comment by Humpelstilzchen on 2018-08-09:
Do you have another distance sensor, e.g. sonar?

Comment by Sufyan on 2018-08-11:
actually i do have an ultrasonic Sensor mounted in front of my vehicle but it's just to detect if any dynamic obstacle comes up

Comment by Humpelstilzchen on 2018-08-15:
You can add a range sensor layer to your local costmap for your ultrasonic.

Answer 1

The navigation stack works perfectly fine without a laser. The main reason you may want to use a laser for navigation (aside from helping with localization) is to mark obstacles on your local / global costmap so that your planners can avoid obstacles. If your global planner ("path planning in A*") is already coming up with an obstacle free path, your local planner will just be doing path following with no active obstacle avoidance. However, when you are doing your A* path planning, because you won't have obstacle avoidance in your local planner you may want to 'inflate' the area around the detected obstacles (i.e., make the obstacles larger so your global plan isn't super close to obstacles, giving your robot a buffer zone).

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Originally posted by stevejp with karma: 929 on 2018-08-08

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2

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Original comments

Comment by Sufyan on 2018-08-11:
Thanks a Lot!!! i have already inflated the area around the obstacle so as to avoid collision... i was also wondering if I can make a map out of that processed image( containing position of my robot and obstacles) on RVIZ . i am using ar track alvar package to detect my Robot