How to define the drone footprint for collision free path planning?

[Pallav1299]

Thanks for the great work. Are we defining the drone footprint for collision free path planning in ego-planner-swarm? If yes, how? Is there any parameter for the same?
Do we have to configure the obstacle inflation to control the same?

In general, a brief documentation of the planner params would help a lot.

[bigsuperZZZX]

Sorry, I don't quite understand your first sentence, what's the word "footprint" mean?

[Pallav1299]

Sorry, I don't quite understand your first sentence, what's the word "footprint" mean?

@bigsuperZZZX, "footprint" refers to the robot_footprint from ROS navigation stack. This basically means the dimensions of the robot.
So to elaborate, how are we telling the planner about the robot dimensions? Is it considering a point model?
With the default planner configuration, I witnessed quite a lot of collisions in simulation tests.

Since I couldn't find a parameter for the robot_footprint, that's when I started comparing it to the ROS Navigation stack.
In order to reduce the collisions, I increased the obstacle inflation param in the advanced_param.xml, which I don't think is generally right to do. How do you define the robot dimensions to the planner?

[bigsuperZZZX]

In fact, we use a point model and the obstacle inflation is the right way to define the "footprint".

[Pallav1299]

@bigsuperZZZX, thanks for the answer.