Inspiration
NASA's Mars 2020 mission which includes the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter drone is my inspiration for this project. I wanted to demonstrate the path planning scenario of a mobile robot as well as a quadcopter in a simulated environment.
What it does
The mobile robot and quadcopter take in a user specified destination and plan paths to reach the destination while avoiding obstacles
How I built it
I have used models of turtlebot and hector_quadrotor packages with the ROS Navigation Stack. Generally, navigation stack is used for 2D navigation for mobile robots using move_base package which equips the robot with global and a local cost maps so it can create global and local plans. Global planner only takes the static obstacles into consideration which is why we need a separate local planner for dynamic obstacles. I tried the same approach for drone navigation where a initial takeoff height is specified and then the quadcopter navigates to the goal location while avoiding obstacles.
Challenges I ran into
- Controlling the height of the quadcopter for hovering
- Integrating several components, packages
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Successful demonstration of exploration planning for both ground and aerial vehicle
What I learned
Specific implementation of ROS Navigation stack for an aerial vehicle in addition to just ground vehicle
What's next for Exploration Planning for Ground and Aerial Vehicles
To spawn both ground and aerial vehicle simultaneously and enable multi-robot communication and perform the assigned tasks collaboratively
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.