follow_waypoints

A package that will buffer move_base goals until instructed to navigate to all waypoints in sequence.

| | |

This is a modified and improved version of the upstream follow_waypoints package. Here are some of the changes compared to the upstream version:

• Removal of the smach dependency - State machine is not needed
• Implement simpler design, where new goals are added to a FIFO and they get poped out, and passed to move_base. This allows adding additional waypoints during the actual navigation run
• Removal of the redundant journey_* logic, reading/writing to files of the repo
• Allow for specifying the waypoints as either poses (using the "Pose Estimation" button from RViz) or by using the "Publish Point" functionality. In case of the latter, a default (0, 0, 0, 1) quaternion orientation is assumed. In the future, we could aslo use an orientation based on the vector connecting previous and current waypoint.
• Add ROS Parameters for most of the settings in the algorithm.
• Reformat code using isort and black.
• Make it python3-compatible - see print statements.
• path_ready, `path_reset are now one-shot std_srvs::Trigger services.
• patrol_mode dynamic-reconfigurable flag to follow the given set of waypoints over and over again until a /path_reset is given

Installation

sudo apt-get install ros-$(rosversion -d)-follow-waypoints

Or alternatively`, to get the latest version and features, clone this repo and compile it as part of your ROS workspace

Documentation on wiki: http://wiki.ros.org/follow_waypoints

Execution

rosrun follow_waypoints follow_waypoints
# Or alternatively
roslaunch follow_waypoints follow_waypoints

New features (not documented on wiki):

Wait_duration parameter.

This sets wait duration in between waypoints. The default value is set to 0.0 sec.

rosparam set wait_duration 5.0

Distance threshold parameter.

Issue the next goal target if the robot reaches within this distance. This has the effect of smoothing motion and not stopping at each waypoint. The default value is set to 0.0 distance which disables the feature.

rosparam set waypoint_distance_tolerance 0.5