This is a rather simple task, where I just want a robot in a large closed autorum full dynamic obstacles (people) to roam around aimlessly while avoiding collisions. This for an art exhibit that has asked to borrow one of our robot bases to carry around an animated sculpture on top of it. I want to keep things simple for them, so presumably no SLAM, but something reactive with navstack is fine.

This is sort of like the security guard scenario, but where the robot is initially kidnaped. Of course there are random walk examples out there, the ones I've found so far:

• random_walk fuerte source from googlecode is AWAL
• kobukirandomwalker ractive bumber based
• Clearpath random_walk reactive 2d lidar left/right/stright

However, I’d like have the 2D laser guided robot keep a smooth and continuous trajectory, rather than abruptly changing in velocity vectors everytime it encounters an obstacle of some proximity, as not to startle the patrons.

• One could just sample and set goal pose from a map, but of course that requires SLAM and some definition of closed space to pool from (e.g what about open doorways and partitioned galeries etc.).
• One could also set the goal to some random far distant direction wrpt the local reference frame, but then the robot would just become a boring wall following robot for the majority of the time.
• I was thinking of have some time shifting gradient to push the robot in random direction, but wasn’t sure of the best method to tie that into the navstack layer we already have nicely tuned for the mobile platform. Shifting relative bearing of a carrot on a stick?

If anyone know of some package out there that already achieves this, I’d rather not reinvent the wheel, even if it's trivial.

Relevant:

• How to navigate unknown area without map