Helping diff. drive robot get through doorways
Hey folks!
I'm working on a differential drive SLAM robot and I have things working pretty well. I'm able to:
- Create a map of my apartment using slam_toolbox
- Navigate from room to room using Nav2 and Goal Poses on RViz2
First off a big thanks to Steve Macenski and all the folks who maintain these open source packages. I've really been enjoying using them so far.
I'm having a problem where my robot is getting "stuck" in doorways that are plenty big for it to navigate through. It doesn't happen every time, and I'd say 50% of the time the robot just breezes through and passes to the next room with no problem. The other 50% though the robot will stop at the threshhold, start rotating to and fro in a confused manner, and sometimes it works itself out after 30sec or so, but most of the time it ends up getting totally stuck until I give it a little help with the joystick.
I have noticed that this happens more often when moving to a room that is positioned a U-turn away from the current room. For instance, the robot can usually handle these paths with no problem:
Whereas it almost ALWAYS gets stuck moving between these two rooms:
It doesn't like something about that turn radius, even though practically there is plenty of room to pass (sometimes it manages to).
What I have tried:
- Confirming the URDF descriptions are accurate to the robot's physical dimensions
- Playing with the wheel separation multiplier in the controller configuration file
But can't seem to shake this issue. Perhaps there is some setting in Nav2 related to the costmap that I can finetune to get this working? Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
Have you installed the plugin in rviz to display the Local Costmap? If you have "fake" obstacles in the Local Costmap, the Local Planner may be unable to find an open path.
Yes you can see in the images in my post that I have the costmap displayed in rviz2. Unless you meant something else. I have made some progress (see my response in a comment below).
The Global Costmap is different from the Local Costmap. It would benefit you to understand the difference.
Apologies, I missed the "Local" keyword. Yes I have viewed the local costmap as well and there doesn't seem to be an issue of phantom obstacles. Thanks for the reply.