Hello,

I've been trying to solve this problem since March with no luck. I posted the issue on the author's Github but it is still unresolved.

My environment is ROS Indigo (Debian install) on Ubuntu 14.04. I have installed the socialnavigationlayers package and the people_msgs package and I have added the ProxemicLayer plugin to my costmap config files as follows:

   plugins:
     - {name: social_layer,          type: "social_navigation_layers::ProxemicLayer"}
     - {name: obstacle_layer,        type: "costmap_2d::ObstacleLayer"}
     - {name: inflation_layer,       type: "costmap_2d::InflationLayer"}

I have verified that the plugin is loaded when movebase is launched and I see the layer in rqtreconfigure where I can change its parameters or disable/enable it.

In the meantime, I have a person detector running on the camera stream on my robot. The person detector publishes detections on a topic (/people) using message type peoplemsgs/People. I have also used the static person publishers from the peoplevelocity_tracker package. In either case, the costmap in RViz in does not change whether the people are visible or not. For example, if I publish a static person using the peoplevelocitytracker package, I would expect an obstacle to appear in the costmap located at the x-y coordinates specified in the /people topic message. But nothing appears in the costmap.

So I did some debugging by inserting some print statements in proxemiclayer.cpp. I have verified that the peoplemsgs/People topic is being subscribed to and the callback is getting the correct number of detected people and their x-y coordinates. However, the costmap does not appear to be updated.

Running rqt_console does not indicate any errors or exceptions.

Is anyone else using the socialnavigationlayers package successfully?

Thanks!
patrick