Hello,
Cheap fix is to set the "clearing" parameter for your laser to false, but probably you still want the laser to do both marking and clearing.
So I would try to play with "min_obstacle_height" and "max_obstacle_height" parameters for both laser and bumper scan; I didn't try this, but I suppose that if bumper obstacles are below laser ones and do not overlap, laser will not clear bumper hits. Can you post your YAML file?
Btw, if you are using Turtlebot 2, there'is a package to publish bumper events as a PointCloud so it can be fussed in a costmap: kobuki_bumper2pc
Hope this helps.
Yes, you can use different values for different sensors. Try this (I didn't!):
max_obstacle_height: 0.60
obstacle_range: 2.5
raytrace_range: 3.0
robot_radius: 0.18
inflation_radius: 0.50
observation_sources:
scan
bump
scan: {data_type: LaserScan, topic: /scan, marking: true, clearing: true, min_obstacle_height: 0.25, max_obstacle_height: 0.35}
bump: {data_type: PointCloud2, topic: mobile_base/sensors/bumper_pointcloud, marking: true, clearing: false, min_obstacle_height: 0.01, max_obstacle_height: 0.10}
I set typical values for Turtlebot 2.
Update:
This works for me... surprisingly! I have read the wiki for costmap2d and min/max obstacle_height are just intended to filter out sensor data above the robot or low enough to be ignored. In fact, afaik, costmap2d keeps no track of which sensor marked/cleared an obstacle, nor at which height it was spotted; if so, my previous reasoning is simply stupid. So I suppose this because of another reason.
Maybe what you need is to use a voxel map, who contains 3D information. I didn't use them by now (set map_type as "voxel")
New update:
I have being experimenting with voxel maps to fuse information from three different sensors and it works fine. But you must be careful when setting min/max obstacle_height for any sensor so each one fits in its voxel, and so they don't interfere with each other. The default voxel map's z_resolution is 0.2, what means that every sensor must be separated by at least 20 cm. Here are my voxel maps and sensors configuration:
...
origin_z: 0.0
z_resolution: 0.1
z_voxels: 3
...
...
kn_scan: {data_type: LaserScan, topic: scan, marking: true, clearing: true, min_obstacle_height: 0.2, max_obstacle_height: 0.3}
ir_scan: {data_type: LaserScan, topic: ir_scan, marking: true, clearing: true, min_obstacle_height: 0.1, max_obstacle_height: 0.2}
bumpers: {data_type: PointCloud2, topic: mobile_base/sensors/bumper_pointcloud, marking: true, clearing: false, min_obstacle_height: 0.0, max_obstacle_height: 0.1}
This works as expected but, as I don't know the internals of costmap, I'm not sure whether my conclusions are right or I just have been lucky!
