bnurbekov / turtlebot_navigation

This project was completed on May 15, 2015. The goal of the project was to implement software system for frontier based exploration and navigation for turtlebot-like robots.

Synopsis

This project implements a Software system for navigation and frontier based exploration for mobile robotic platforms (Turtlebots).

Description

First of all, Turtlebots are small robots that can drive around and sense the environment through a Kinect sensor.
One of them is shown below.

In general, the purpose of the project was to build an informed search algorithm on a grid (shown below), so that the robot could explore the environment. The robot had to be able to locate borders of the unexplored zones (shown in orange) and find a path to those borders using an A* search. After that, the goal was to drive to the borders in order to explore those zones by spinning in one place.

(Explored cells are shown in white; expanded obstacles are shown in black; unexplored zone borders are shown in orange)

The project is interesting from the software engineering stand-point because it is very high-level (no low-level robotics involved), allowing to practice search algorithms, such as BFS, DFS and A*, and performance optimization techniques, such as multi-threading.

Outcome

The robot was able to successfully explore the environment.

Directions

The main files to look for are "scripts/mapping.py" and "scripts/control.py".​ Installation instructions are located in the repository.

Installation

Save this package into catkin_ws/src/.

Run gazebo simulation by running 'roslaunch turtlebot_gazebo turtlebot_world.launch' or bringing up the actual turtlebot.

In a new tab, run 'rosrun rviz rviz'.

Open the final.rviz settings located in the 'rviz' folder.

Then run the following commands:

1. Run 'roslaunch final_project final_project.launch'
2. Run 'rosrun final_project mapping.py'. This will run the mapping service.
3. Run 'rosrun final_project control.py'. This will run the control script.

turtlebot_navigation's Issues

FrontierBasedExplorationAndNavigation

Hello!Thank you for your share!Do you have a blog or articles related to the source code?I want to break down the code n in detail.

ImportError: No module named final_project.srv

Hi
First of all, thank you for sharing this code.
I have some troubles in making it work though.
I get the error "ImportError: No module named final_project.srv" when I try to launch your python programs.

Furthermore, I am not quit sure where I should execute the commands in your tutorial. On the Turtlebot laptop or on the remote PC ?

Thanks in advance !