Support multi-story buildings

[crdelsey]

Support navigation in multi-story buildings. This involves:

• Making a planner work across multiple maps
• Breaking the navigate mission into multiple sub-navigations. ie. nav to elevator, summon elevator, nav into elevator, select next floor, nav to final goal

[SteveMacenski]

@crdelsey I see this ticket really just asking for2 things:

• ability to change maps in map server
• ability to annotate points with tags in the map

changing maps lets you change floor by a higher level schema. Annotating points lets you say "staging point" and "on elevator" point for each floor map.

As this is a really user specific application, I think those 2 capabilities are what need to be actually introduced and then have sufficient re-usability for other items. With those 2 things implementing this would be trivial + elevator APIs

[SteveMacenski]

Also #547 and #392 cover this topic

[jwallace42]

Closing ticket,

The ability to change maps in in the map server. Annotating the map is current open in #1595.

[SteveMacenski]

That's not the same as having a solution that's well supported to handle planning and tasks involving multiple floors

[jwallace42]

That's not the same as having a solution that's well supported to handle planning and tasks involving multiple floors

I think that the open rmf traffic editor supports this ability. Is there something different from this that you had in mind?

[SteveMacenski]

This is not high on my current list of things to work on or think about (unless there was contributors looking to help out and I would to design if they had the time to implement) so I can't answer in specificity. But until there's a well thought out and fully developed integration with Nav2 and multi-floor navigation, this should stay open.

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One possible solution using BTs

• The user gives a goal to the robot in any floor
• The robot checks if the given goal is on the same floor, if it is, then it proceeds to send that goal to nav2
• If however the goal is in a different floor, the package sends the robot the goal of getting inside the elevator (Literally publish the x,y coordinates of inside the elevator to the goal_pose topic), the package then sends the elevator gazebo plugin the command to rise/lower to the desired floor
• Once the floor has been reached, the elevator sends a notification to the BT that it has reached the desired floor, the package/- BT then loads the map of this new floor to the map server and publishes the initial goal given by the user to nav2.
• The robot successfully navigates to the goal.