ROS Navstack for boat

Hello all,

From my knowledge, the navstack is intended for use with wheeled robots. However, I am currently working with a system which is a 16 foot catamaran vessel (one motor on each pontoon). We currently utilize ROS on the system for control, however we are looking to use the navstack for scripting autonomous tasks such as gps waypoint navigation, etc.

The only implementation requirement I am a bit curious about is the odometry information. I see that an odometry message consists of just position, orientation, linear velocity, and angular velocity. I'm guessing in the past, some of the estimates for this information came from assuming wheel-based motion with no slip.

My question is this: If I have a sensor which gives me very accurate GPS location, orientations, linear velocities, and angular velocities, will the navstack work okay for a boat? The sensor we are using is a VectorNav VN-300, in case anyone is curious.

Thanks in advance for any insight and/or advice.

Asked by mjbegneaud on 2017-02-23 15:11:22 UTC

Comments

Don't know about a boat, but the fact that Odometry msgs contain 'just' those fields doesn't mean that there is an assumption about 'no slip'. Odometry can come from many sources, wheel-based is just one of them. Take a look at the robot_localization pkg.

Asked by gvdhoorn on 2017-02-23 15:53:25 UTC

Sorry for late response. So from what I've gathered about the robot_localization package is that I can feed it my data and it estimates the robot position (in ROS odom frame coordinates) based on that data? I see I can also then feed its output to a navsat_transform node to incorporate GPS data?

Asked by mjbegneaud on 2017-02-27 23:10:19 UTC