How to do off-road navigation without a prior map in ros
Hi,
Hope you all are doing well during this situation.
I am kind of new to ros and still getting used to it. So ignore my "phrasing" in certain cases.
I am in the process of making a autonomous off-road rover,which sort of looks like jackal ugv.
I am using an old gaming laptop (cpu - core i7, 16 gb ram,gtx 1050ti gpu) with ubuntu 18.04 and ros melodic.
It has the following sensors - An intel d435, An rplidar a2, An IMU(MPU- 9250), wheel encoders(Quadrature encoders).
Using the above mentioned sensors I am messages publishing in the following topics -
From encoders readings (Using an aruduino due)-
/odom
/imu/data_raw
(Wrote the publishers by modifying ros examples and using serial node packages )
Using the ros_rplidar package -
/laser_scan
and using the realsense_ros package -
/camera/color/camera_info
/camera/color/image_raw
/camera/depth/camera_info
/camera/depth/image_rect_raw
/camera/extrinsics/depth_to_color
/camera/extrinsics/depth_to_infra1
/camera/extrinsics/depth_to_infra2
/camera/infra1/camera_info
/camera/infra1/image_rect_raw
/camera/infra2/camera_info
/camera/infra2/image_rect_raw
Using the data from the IMU and the encoders I wrote a launch file which starts the robot_localization node.That node publishes base_link to odom transformation using an ekf.
I also wrote a subscriber node running on another arduino due, which subscribes to the /cmd_vel topic and can control the desired speed of the motors. The motor controls seems to work ok-ish after i turned the ekf. To verify I set the fixed frame to odom in rviz, then visualised pointcloud2 data and the laser scan data and drove around using teleop_joy package.
The point clouds didn't drift much.
I have looked into the rtab map package.
Now my actual question -
Is there any package to do autonomous outdoor navigation using the sensors I have without building a map beforehand rather making a map as the robot continues to explore/does mapping?I don't want to use a gps.
What are the things I should checkout.
TIA.
note - Dear admins/ moderators, before flagging as duplicate or irrelevant please read the whole question. Thanks for understanding.
