Revision history [back]

This is an ancient question that never got one answer, so I'll throw up what I've found since 2015.

1. The now famous ROS Navigation Tuning Guide PDF by Kaiyu Zheng that came out in 2016, a year after this question was written: http://kaiyuzheng.me/documents/navguide.pdf
   Especially pay attention to the part about creating a "gradient" for the local planner so every path is in the middle.

2. http://wiki.ros.org/teb_local_planner I don't know why this isn't the default, it has worked so much better in every way than the seemingly more common dwa_local_planner, and teb works "out of the box" with no tuning required to just navigate a map.