[ros-users] Avoiding Collisions between robots

[Jack O'Quin]

On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Eitan Marder-Eppstein
<eitan at willowgarage.com> wrote:
> David,
>
> On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 7:53 PM, <davidbsp at iol.pt> wrote:
>>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I have been making some experiments on ROS together with Stage, using
>> multiple mobile robots in the same environment.
>> All robots run the navigation stack. However, sometimes they collide
>> with each other.
>
> So, its true that the navigation stack doesn't do a great job of handling
> the multi-robot case, but I'd expect you to get reasonable results in Stage
> as long as the laser mounted on each robot is capable of seeing the body of
> the other robot. Have you verified that each robot in stage sees the other
> in its entirety?

This is definitely worth checking.

I had problems migrating simulations to recent versions of stage.
Although stage is a 2D simulation, they've added some "2.5D" features
in stage version 3. Objects now have heights, and the laser simulation
appears to send out a horizontal planar scan at the Z level of the
laser's position. A laser mounted on top of a simulated robot may "see
over the top" of another, similar robot.
-- 
 joq