avoiding obstacles with IR and Ultrasonic sensor in addition to laser data

Question

I have turtlebot3 with imu, LIDAR and ultrasonic/infrared sensors. I want to build a map autonomously, and then navigate on this map, avoid obstacles such as glass, mirrored metal chair legs.

1. First question. For example, at first, I want to build a map autonomously. Am I supposed to use ultrasonic sensors here at this stage, for mapping? Should i give sensor_msgs/Range to mapping packages, such as gmapping, cartographer and others? Or its only for move_base?

2. Second question. At this picture, on the right, http://wiki.ros.org/move_base?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=overview_tf.png I see sensor_topics(sensor_msgs/LaserScan, sensor_msgs/PointCloud), but i dont understand, how it is supposed to give sensor_msgs/Range to move_base package?

Is there any detailed tutorials or examples about how to use data from laser and ultrasonic/ir sensors together to avoid obstacles?

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Originally posted by june2473 on ROS Answers with karma: 83 on 2019-07-31

Post score: 0

Answer 1

1. Usually mapping packages only take into account laser information and it is common place to ignore ultrasonic/infrared sensors during this stage. If you want the obstacles detected by your ultrasonic/infrared sensors to appear on the map, then you would need to feed them to the mapping process. For instance cartographer accepts laser readings, imu and point clouds as input. You could transform your range messages to point cloud and pass it to cartographer.

2. The image that you mention is a bit old, move_base uses costmap_2d to generate the global and local costmaps. costmap_2d can accept many different types of data sources and luckily there is a plugin for range sensors that you can use: range_sensor_layer

I don't know about a detailed tutorial to use laser and ultrasonic/ir sensors together. But if you can get your system working with the laser, then it is quite straight forward to add range sensors.

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Originally posted by Martin Peris with karma: 5625 on 2019-07-31

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1