Set robot dimensions

Question

I'm using MRPT, in particular the CHolonomicVFF class, for a university project. I made a ROS node which implements a simple obstacle avoidance functionality, it seems to work but I need a way to specify the robot dimensions. I checked the CHolonomicVFF class wiki, but i didn't find anything helpful.

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

mrpt::nav::CHolonomicVFF (and all other "holonomic" solvers in mrpt-nav) works on the assumption of a "point robot", without radius.

In other words, you should enlarge all your obstacles with the robot radius before feeding them to this class. Similar to the way cost_map does in ROS.

The reason for this design is that "holonomic" navigators in MRPT play a role in the navigation pipeline after what is called PTG-based transformations, which abstract away the actual robot shape so it can be dealt as a "point".