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DWA is really more of a controller - not a planner. Given a trajectory (which in ROS is simply an array of geometry_msgs/Pose), and the current position of the robot (again, another Pose message), it will compute the best command to apply to the mobile base at that instant in time (in ROS, a geometry_msgs/Twist message). If you run the DWA algorithm at a high enough frequency (20-50hz), you can "follow" the plan pretty accurately.

In the ROS implementation, the "trajectory" is nothing but a series of poses - there is no time-parameterization, etc. This trajectory is created by a global planner (which, really, is the only real "planner" since DWA really is more of a "controller").

The ROS implementations are located here: https://github.com/ros-planning/navigation