Navigating Apartments with ROS

23 Dec 2011 slam  maxwell  ros  While Maxwell tends to reside at the office most days, I've recently brought him home a few times. I'm now working towards some cool demos of mobile manipulation in a home environment, but the first step is of course to navigate that environment.

I've been trying for some time to use only the ASUS on the head, however, the thick carpeting and carpet/linoleum transitions really throw of my odometry at times. I finally dropped back and just used my low-cost Hokuyo. This evening I created a new map, without much effort at all, using gmapping and the Hokuyo:

Some preliminary tests show that my planner parameters will probably work well, even in the smaller environment (the map above is 10m x 10m). What is very apparent is that my laser doesn't pick up much of my furniture -- the larger room is actually mostly full with tables at various heights, which are only showing up as stray points to the laser. Adding the ASUS for 3D obstacle avoidance should help quite a bit.