[ros-users] ND, VHF etc in ROS ?

[Brian Gerkey]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 11:53 PM, Arkapravo Bhaumik
<arkapravobhaumik at gmail.com> wrote:
> My question, Player Project (Player Stage in particular) which supported
> popular navigation algorithms (viz. VFH, ND, line/wall following, SND etc),
> are these available in ROS ?

hi Arkapravo,

There's a flexible and nicely-featured navigation stack in ROS:
  http://www.ros.org/wiki/navigation
It provides the pieces necessary to make a planar robot navigate, with
or without a map.

I haven't seen an implementation of VFH (in this context, Vector Field
Histogram; not to be confused with Viewpoint Feature Histogram) in
ROS.  Same for ND and SND.  But unless you're looking for those
algorithms specifically, you should have a look at the
base_local_planner, which implements the Trajectory Rollout and DWA
algorithms for local goal-seeking obstacle avoidance:
  http://www.ros.org/wiki/base_local_planner
There's a nicer implementation of DWA in dwa_local_planner:
  http://www.ros.org/wiki/dwa_local_planner

A number of drivers from Player have been brought into ROS.  Some
notes on how to do it are here:
  http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/PlayerIntegration
I would expect the ND driver to be easily ported from Player to ROS,
because underneath it's a standalone library.  Porting VFH would be
unpleasant, because the implementation is very Player-specific.  I'm
not familiar enough with SND to say how much work it would be.

	brian.