[ros-users] Navigation Stack without a Laser Sensor

[Piyush Khandelwal]

Hello,

I have the following setup
  1) A differential drive robot
  2) Overhead localization from an external system.
  3) A static occupancy grid of the world (or some other
representation for the location of walls and obstacles) - any dynamic
obstacles are currently ignored.

I would like to use the ROS Navigation Stack for autonomously
navigating the robot around my lab, but the lack of a laser scanner
currently prohibits me from doing so. I can replace amcl with the
information provided by the overhead localization fairly simply, but
nav_core is highly dependent on the laser scan. Are there any options?
I can potentially publish the LaserScan message from the static map,
but I am not sure if this is the correct approach.

Thanks!
Piyush