Hi Eitan,

> It should be possible to run the navfn planner on a static map without
> running move_base. Can you try bringing up the costmap with the attached
> parameters. I've tested this configuration on my machine and it brings up a
> costmap of a static map just fine.
>   
Thanks, that works! I just had to set /use_sim_time in example.launch to 
"false" otherwise it would not work (and roswtf complained).

For a reference, the necessary steps were:
1.) start a roscore
2.) start map_server with a static map
3.) run "static_transform_publisher 0 0 0 0 0 0 /map base_link 100" from tf
4.) start "example.launch" with the modified example_params.yaml
5.) rviz now displays /costmap_node/costmap/obstacles and 
/costmap_node/costmap/inflated_obstacles fine

> There aren't any tutorials that deal with path planning alone, although
> there is extensive documentation on both NavfnROS (
> http://www.ros.org/wiki/navfn) and Costmap2DROS (
> http://www.ros.org/wiki/costmap_2d) which are the two components of the
> navigation stack you want to link together. Basically, you'll create a node
> that holds a Costmap2DROS object which is passed to a NavfnROS object for
> planning. You can always look at the source code for move_base to get an
> idea of what you need to do, though move_base uses a plugin architecture
> which means it will never refer to a NavfnROS planner explicitly. Instead,
> it will refer to a BaseGlobalPlanner instance that NavfnROS inherits from,
> but the API will be the same.
Yes, that was my plan from now on. I just thought that maybe there was 
something like a simple "map -> costmap -> waypoints" pipeline already 
available.

Best regards,
Armin

-- 
Armin Hornung                              Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~hornunga   Dept. of Computer Science
HornungA@informatik.uni-freiburg.de        Humanoid Robots Lab
Tel.: +49 (0)761-203-8010                  Georges-Köhler-Allee 79
Fax : +49 (0)761-203-8007                  D-79110 Freiburg, Germany