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The underlying Costmap2d (and associated layers) actually work on 8-bit values. if you look closely at the inflation layer, you'll see it sets a wide range of values - since you want to have a decreasing cost the farther away from an obstacle you are - so what you want to do is definitely possible.

The piece of text talking about only 3 levels, I think might actually refer specifically to the VoxelLayer - which does do some funky packing of the data in order to represent each vertical column of voxels in a single 32-bit word. I'm thinking that the documentation has been somewhat incorrectly refactored over time (the whole layer thing was added years after the original Costmap_2d was created).