Revision history [back]

In addition to Peter's answer, you can also write a reactive controller driven directly by a twist message on the cmd_val topic (see http://answers.ros.org/question/33545/geometry_msgstwist-and-cmd_vel-on-turtlebot/ ). This implies computing movement speed from target in the field of view, computing a repulsive obstacle avoidance from depth pointcloud and summing them to get an egocentric speed. I think it requires more work than use map information but may be more low-level and simpler than using a full navigation stack.