Tricycle robot navigation on Gazebo

A custom tricycle robot navigation project on gazebo environment. Tested on Ubuntu 20.04, with ROS Noetic.

The robot is a wheeled tricycle mobile platform with a single actuated front wheel and steering where center of rotation of both coincidents, and two back wheels are non-actuated. The robot's center of body is located at middle point of the rear axis, in between the two back wheels.

Robot odometry is being calculated using a modified version of tricycle plugin libgazebo_ros_tricycle_drive. For mapping, localization and path planning; gmapping, AMCL and Timed elastic band planner methods were used respectively and the configuration parameters were tuned heuristically.

Installation

Download this package to the src folder of your ROS workspace

git clone https://github.com/kuralme/tricyclEbot

Dependencies

TEB local planner sudo apt-get install ros-<dist>-teb-local-planner

Also, give permission to execute if navigation script(ebot_nav) doesn't work.

Demo video

https://youtu.be/ySX_F9NLxns

Instructions

• To run the complete simulation of a robot following the path through pre-determined waypoints:
  roslaunch ebot_description ebot.launch
roslaunch ebot_description path_follow.launch

• Gazebo simulation only: roslaunch ebot_gazebo ebot_world.launch

• Mapping: roslaunch ebot_description ebot_mapping.launch

• Keyboard teleop: rosrun ebot_navigation ebot_teleop.py

• Save the map:
  roscd ebot_navigation/maps
rosrun map_server map_saver -f my_map

TODOs

• Fine-tune planner parameters for better maneuvering
• Change odometry method to 'encoder' instead of 'world'