Global Planner Library for Autonomous Robots

This package is a library implementing various global waypoint planning algorithms, such as RRT, RRT*, DEP (our unknown exploration planner), based on the occupancy voxel map and the Octomap for autonomous mobile robots.

Authors: Zhefan Xu and Christopher Suzuki, Computational Engineering & Robotics Lab (CERLAB) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

If you find this work helpful, kindly show your support by giving us a free ⭐️. Your recognition is truly valued.

This repo can be used as a standalone package and also comes as a module of our autonomy framework.

I. Installation Guide

This repo has been tested on ROS Melodic with Ubuntu 18.04 and ROS Noetic with Ubuntu 20.04 and it depends on map_manager which provides the occupancy voxel map implementation and octomap for octree-based map.

# install dependency
sudo apt install ros-[melodic/noetic]-octomap* # octomap

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/Zhefan-Xu/global_planner.git

cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin_make

II. Run Planner DEMO

For simple RRT-based planner demo, please run the following commands:

roslaunch global_planner rrtInteractive.launch

Use 2D Nav Goal in Rviz to select start and goal position in the map as shown below:

The example of the exploration planner can be shown as below (Please follow this repo for instructions):

The related paper can be found on:

Zhefan Xu*, Christopher Suzuki*, Xiaoyang Zhan, Kenji Shimada, "Heuristic-based Incremental Probabilistic Roadmap for Efficient UAV Exploration in Dynamic Environments”, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024. [paper] [video].

Zhefan Xu, Di Deng, and Kenji Shimada, “Autonomous UAV Exploration of Dynamic Environments via Incremental Sampling and Probabilistic Roadmap”, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2021. [paper] [video]

III. Parameters

• RRT-based planner paramters can be found in global_planner/cfg/planner.yaml. The followings are the default values:

  • collision_box: [0.4, 0.4, 0.4]
  • env_box: [-100, 100, -100, 100, 0, 1.5]
  • timeout: 2.0
  • rrt_incremental_distance: 0.3
  • rrt_connect_goal_ratio: 0.2
  • goal_reach_distance: 0.4
  • map_resolution: 0.2
  • vis_RRT: False (Not available for RRT*)
  • vis_path: True
  • neighborhood_radius: 1.0 (RRT* Only)
  • max_num_neighbors: 10 (RRT* Only)

• DEP planner parameters (for unknown exploration) can be found in global_planner/cfg/dep_params.yaml.

IV. Code Exmaple & API

Please see example global_planner/src/rrt_interactive_node.cpp for RRT-based planner and global_planner/src/test_dep_node.cpp for unkonwn exploration planner. The example shows how to use the code API for your applications.

V. Issues

If you cannot visulize the Octomap with ROS noetic, that is because the octomap_ros package has some tf name incompatibility issue. To solve that, please try building the octomap_ros from source with the following steps:

Step1: download the octomap mapping source files

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/OctoMap/octomap_mapping.git

Step2: modify source files and catkin make Please change all the frame id /map to map in octomap_mapping/octomap_server/OctomapServer.cpp and octomap_mapping/octomap_server/octomap_server_static.cpp. There should be 2 places.

cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin_make

VI. Citation and Reference

If you find this work useful, please cite the paper:

@article{xu2023heuristic,
  title={Heuristic-based Incremental Probabilistic Roadmap for Efficient UAV Exploration in Dynamic Environments},
  author={Xu, Zhefan and Suzuki, Christopher and Zhan, Xiaoyang and Shimada, Kenji},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.09121},
  year={2023}
}

@article{xu2021autonomous,
  title={Autonomous UAV Exploration of Dynamic Environments via Incremental Sampling and Probabilistic Roadmap},
  author={Xu, Zhefan and Deng, Di and Shimada, Kenji},
  journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
  year={2021},
  publisher={IEEE}
}