Alternative Planners - FontysAtWork/ESA-PROJ GitHub Wiki

Alternative planners

We've looked at different local planners and what algorithms they use for navigation. As of now we've researched several planners, but we haven't had the time to test their real-world performance.

DWA local planner

The DWA (dynamic window approach) local planner is a package that specifically implements a DWA algorithm. We chose to use this planner for better usage of the omniwheels present on the current robot.

teb_local_planner

When researching these by looking at their documentation, already working projects and other people’s experiences we quickly realized that the teb_local_planner would not work for us because the current version only works with non-holonomic type robots and we use a robotbase with omni wheels(holonomic).

eband_local_planner

We tried to implement the eband_local_planner since this planner tries to minimize computational requirements. This was interesting because we've been hitting our computation power limits with the current navigation stack. The current EBand local planner implementations are mostly tested for non-holonomic drives: while it has support for holonomic type drives this functionality was developed very early on, hasn’t been tested since and isn’t being actively developed. This is why we decided against using this planner, as this project needs to be able to stay up-to-date and we’d like to be able to periodically update all the software so that we can take advantage of new developments which won’t be possible when software isn’t actively being developed.