Use global costmap for path following

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Hi all,

I have a car-like-robot and would like to run some path following demos, similar to the one in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p62i...

Basically, the car just follows a yellow line on the ground. Since there are not much other structure in the environment, it is hard for "localization" to work. I am thinking just make a faked global costmap. Here are the details:

1. Collect some key points manually from the path.
2. Use a matlab program to link these points into a curve, write the curve to a image, run distance transform, and then threshold. Basically, I set all pixels close to the path to "free", and pixels far away from the path to 'lethal".
3. Use this image as global costmap and run the existing navigation stack.

Then the navigation stack will take care of speed control, steering, obstacle avoidance, etc.

Is this going to work? Any suggestions?