Flexible Navigation is a rework of the ROS2 Navigation2 stack into independent modules that
interface with FlexBE App and FlexBE Behavior Engine compatible state implementations.
These allow a user to graphically chain together states in a state machine to essentially
create their own navigation stack to suit any need.
This allows for supervisory and sliding autonomy within navigation, and better control over contingencies and recovery behaviors.
This system provides specific navigation planning and path following capabilities based on the ROS2 Navigation2 [Nav2] packages and is compatible with any global_planner and local_planner plugin.
A ROS node wrapper for each plugin type provides several Nav2's simple action server interfaces to FlexBE App state implementations.
Clone this repository to your ROS workspace.
rosdep update rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src
This will install the necessary dependencies, primarily those associated with the ROS Navigation2 system. system.
Then, from the ROS workspace folder do the normal
colcon build
A complete demonstration setup for the system is provided at Turtlebot Flexible Navigation. Follow setup and operation directions there for an integrated demonstration.
The Turtlebot Flexible Navigation provides two demonstrations. The first uses a 2-level planner as a demonstration, where the global planner plans over the full map, and a local planner plans over smaller window.
An alternative demonstration uses a three layer planning scheme to demonstrate the flexibility of the decoupled approach.
The Flexible Navigation system has been tested using the latest version of ROS2 Foxy on Ubuntu 20.04. You should first follow the ROS2 Install Guide and get that set up before proceeding.
Please use the following publications for reference when using Flexible Navigation:
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David C. Conner and Justin Willis, "Flexible Navigation: Finite state machine-based integrated navigation and control for ROS enabled robots," IEEE SoutheastCon 2017.
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Joshua Zutell, David C. Conner and Philipp Schillinger, "ROS 2-Based Flexible Behavior Engine for Flexible Navigation ,", IEEE SouthEastCon 2022.
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Philipp Schillinger, Stefan Kohlbrecher, and Oskar von Stryk, "Human-Robot Collaborative High-Level Control with Application to Rescue Robotics", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Stockholm, Sweden, May 2016.
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Stefan Kohlbrecher et al. "A Comprehensive Software Framework for Complex Locomotion and Manipulation Tasks Applicable to Different Types of Humanoid Robots." Frontiers in Robotics and AI 3 (2016): 31.
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Alberto Romay et al., “Collaborative autonomy between high-level behaviors and human operators for remote manipulation tasks using different humanoid robots,” Journal of Field Robotics, September 2016.
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