Navigation2 is the ROS 2 successor to the ROS Navigation Stack, which the authors say had not kept up with modern needs. A behaviour tree orchestrates the navigation tasks, it adds support for dynamic environments and more kinds of sensors, and it uses ROS 2’s lifecycle management, which the authors pitch for safety-critical use. They tested it by running robots across a campus among students, in the spirit of an earlier marathon experiment by Eppstein et al. The software is open source.
Findings
- The abstract reports a long campus deployment alongside students and no quantitative results; distances and hours are in the paper body, which I have not read.
Limits
- Abstract-level reading only.
- A single ground robot type and a campus setting, going by the abstract.
Relevance
Nav2 is the usual navigation stack for ROS 2 ground robots; GoGet cites it as the target for its plans on a real ground vehicle. A behaviour tree is also a readable record of what the robot decided, a symbolic interface in the sense of Sun’s essay. Open question for long-term autonomy: how does a navigation stack’s recovery logic hold up after weeks in a building that keeps changing?
Links
- arXiv
- Subfield: Planning and navigation