I would like to know if an ultrasonic sensor array (3-Sensors, 45 degrees apart) will be able to mimic the laser range sensor required for the navigation stack provided by ROS.

asked 2015-06-19 06:22:25 -0500

miguel
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I Have 3 Ultrasonic Sensors and motor Encoders for Odometry. I am planning on using the ROS navigation stack in order to help me produce a 2D floor map, will this be possible.

answered 2015-06-19 09:06:01 -0500

David Lu

10932 ●123 ●219 ●250 http://MetroRobots.com/

You can use the range_sensor_layer in Hydro and mroe recent version of ROS navigation to incorporate the Range datatype, but you will get a lot less data (and degraded performance) using sonar.

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I have been looking into this, and the navigation stack requires sensor streams to be published to the stack, currently it says that the stack only supports laser_scan and Point Cloud messages. How do I interpret the sensor_msgs/Range in order to use the stack?

miguel ( 2015-06-22 02:04:33 -0500 )edit

Where does it say that? That's probably some outdated documentation.

David Lu ( 2015-06-22 09:43:50 -0500 )edit

http://wiki.ros.org/navigation/Tutori... : "However, the current navigation stack only accepts sensor data published using either the sensor_msgs/LaserScan Message type or the sensor_msgs/PointCloud Message type"

miguel ( 2015-06-22 10:27:54 -0500 )edit

Thanks. Using the range_sensor_layer gets around that requirement. http://wiki.ros.org/costmap_2d/Tutori...

David Lu ( 2015-06-22 12:56:31 -0500 )edit

Okay I will do. Thanks for the help!

miguel ( 2015-06-22 13:14:59 -0500 )edit

I have a question regarding the range_sensor_layer, if you have more than one sensor is there more than one plugin for the yaml file, ie.- {name: sonar1, type: "range_sensor_layer::RangeSensorLayer"} then the next one would be sonar2?

miguel ( 2015-06-30 06:42:33 -0500 )edit

Yes. you can name it whatever is convenient.

David Lu ( 2015-06-30 07:22:07 -0500 )edit

Hi @David, How to I use AMCL, can I just remap my ultrasonic sensors to the /scan topic? If so how do I do it?

miguel ( 2015-07-07 14:49:00 -0500 )edit

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