Comparison of ROS Local Planners for a Holonomic Robot in Gazebo Simulator

Abstract

Safe robot navigation in a dynamic environment is an essential part of an autonomous exploration path planning. The path planning part of navigation involves global and local planners. While a global planner finds an optimal path with a prior knowledge of an environment and static obstacles, a local planner recalculates the path to avoid dynamic obstacles. The main goal of the local planning is adjusting an initial plan produced by the global planner in an online fashion. It is a crucial step to ensure a robot operation in dynamic environments because in real world scenarios an environment usually contains people and thus a dynamic obstacles avoidance must respond quickly and recalculate an actual route. Holonomic robotic platforms are robotic vehicles that use omni-wheels to move in any direction, at any angle, without an additional rotation. Because of a construction and a wheel design these robotic platforms are ideal for working zones with a limited space access. This paper provides a comparison of ROS local planners that support omni-wheel mobile robots: Trajectory Rollout, DWA, EBand, and TEB. The algorithms were compared using a path length, a travelling time and a number of obstacle collisions. Gazebo simulator was used for modeling virtual scenes with dynamic obstacles.