Path Optimization by Elastic Band

Submitted by admin on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 17:18

Visiting scholar Christian Connette from Fraunhofer IPA has just finished up his projects here at Willow Garage. Christian works on the Care-O-bot 3 robot platform, which shares many ROS libraries in common with the PR2 robot. While he was here at Willow Garage, he worked on implementing an "elastic band" approach (Quinlan and Khatib) for the ROS navigation stack. You can watch the video above to find out more about this work, or checkout the slides below for more technical details (download PDF). The software is available as open source in the eband_local_planner package on ROS.org.

Comments

Nice work Christian! This

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 04/05/2011 - 06:36.
Nice work Christian! This technique seems quite complementary to sampling-based global planning methods. I see that this has been implemented as a LocalPlanner taking into account control tasks. However the original paper don't talk anything about any specific control method. I wonder if it couldn't be implemented as a Decorator pattern over the nav_core::LocalPlanner interface to use others LocalPlanners like DWA for trajectory tracking and obstacle avoidance tasks. It would be nice to have a 3-tier navigation system: global-planning, dynamic path optimization - local-planning Regards.