The following are the mandatory requirements for interfacing a mobile robot with ROS navigation package:
- Odometry source: Robot should publish its odometry/position data with respect to the starting position. The necessary hardware components that provide odometry information are wheel encoders, IMU, and 2D/3D cameras (visual odometry).
- Sensor source: There should be a laser scanner or a 3D vision sensor sensor, which can act as a laser scanner. The laser scanner data is essential for map building process using SLAM.
- Sensor transform using tf: The robot should publish the transform of the sensors and other robot components using ROS transform.
- Base controller: The base controller is a ROS node, which can convert a
twistmessage from Navigation stack to corresponding motor velocities.
Figure 1: Chefbot prototype
We can check the components present in the robot and determine whether they satisfy the Navigation stack requirements...