[ros-users] base_local_planner and ackerman kinematics?

[Domenico G. Sorrenti]

Dear all,

we are trying to use ros for an autonomous driving project, i.e., involving a car-like vehicle.

We passed through the documentation that we have been able to find in the web (i.e., the list of ros packages), and we could not find an alternative to base_local_planner. BTW, given the size of the list and ourselves being 1st-time users, we would really appreciate a confirmation about this inference being correct.

The work most related to ours that we could find is the Marvin Darpa Urban Challenge autonomous car (U.Texas at Austin, P. Stone lab.), which is reported having been ported to ROS. In the art_vehicle stack we could find the art_nav package and the pilot node, which looked to us as the one that might be including the solution to the problem. We might have mis-understood the description of its working, but it appears to us as a node accepting ros commands, not issuing them.

Assuming base_local_planner to be a required package (beside a global planner), we thought we need to have it to avoid issuing "rotation in place" commands. In other words, as the vehicle cannot rotate in place, we thought we should inhibit base_local_planner to consider rotation in place as an admissible motion primitive, during planning.

Unfortunately, we have not been able to devise a way to push base_local_planner to disregard such rotations.

We apologize if we missed relevant online documentation about our question.

Do you have some suggestion about how to force base_local_planner not to use rotation in place or, in general, on how to deal with ackerman kinematics in ros?

Thanks for your attention. All the best. Domenico, Axel, Andrea, Francesco.

--
Domenico Giorgio Sorrenti, Ph.D.
Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione,
Universita` degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca,
Building U14, viale Sarca 336, 20126, Milano, Italy
tel +39 026448.7841, fax +39 026448.7805
email <mailto:sorrenti at disco.unimib.it>sorrenti at disco.unimib.it, <http://www.disco.unimib.it/sorrenti>http://www.disco.unimib.it/sorrenti