Setting Up Navigation Stack with only Odomtery

Question

Hello,

I'm trying to set up the navigation stack on a robot possessing only odometry devices (wheel encoder, IMU, and GPS, published to /odom /imu /gps). No camera/laser. The robot is also using robot_state_publisher to publish the transformations between robot parts. The tree looks like this:

/base_footprint --> /base_link --> /imu /gps /front_left_wheel_link /front_right_wheel_link ...

If I want to use only odometry sources (wheel encoder, IMU, and GPS) to navigate the robot, it seems the only frame transformation that needs to be done is /map --> /odom --> /base_footprint. I was wondering if this should be done manually or navigation stack (amcl localization?) is taking care of these two transformations?

Thanks

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Originally posted by ROSCMBOT on ROS Answers with karma: 651 on 2014-08-22

Post score: 0

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Original comments

Comment by Andromeda on 2014-08-24:
Can I ask you how do you get information from /imu /gps and /odom the move your base_link? In the tutorial about setting up the navigation stack I didn t find any example. Regards

Answer 1

Without a laser, you won't be able to use amcl. You should be able to use http://wiki.ros.org/fake_localization to use the odometry alone, however, given that odometry is going to drift, you'll likely get lost in your map.

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Originally posted by fergs with karma: 13902 on 2014-08-23

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

Answer 2

You can fuse all those sources together using a state estimation package like robot_localization or robot_pose_ekf. Depending on your GPS, there will likely be some extra effort required to get its data integrated. Those nodes will generate a odom->base_link transform for you.

However, if you really want to follow the ROS spec (particularly REP-105), you'll need to maintain all three frames (map, odom, and base_link), and only fuse GPS data with the estimate in the map frame. I'm in the process of updating robot_localization to better support this.

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Originally posted by Tom Moore with karma: 13689 on 2014-08-24

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Post score: 1