Wavefront Frontier Detection

### Implementation of Frontier Exploration based on this research paper: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1806/1806.03581.pdf

Overview

• Intended to work with ROS2’s Nav2 stack

• Computes a list of Frontier centroids from the currently available Occupancy Grid

• Invoke’s Nav2’s waypoint follower to move the robot to the Frontiers

• Upon reaching the waypoint destinations, the latest Occupancy Grid will be evaluated for new Frontiers and continues to plot new waypoints until all Frontiers have been discovered

Instructions

Building

For basic/general build instructions follow this tutorial: https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/Tutorials/Writing-A-Simple-Py-Publisher-And-Subscriber/

• git clone the project into your colcon workspace’s “src” directory

• In your colcon workspace root directory run:

    rosdep install -i --from-path src --rosdistro foxy -y
    colcon build --packages-select nav2_wfd
  

• Setup development path:

    . install/setup.bash
  

Running

Works with Nav2’s Turtlebot Simulation: https://navigation.ros.org/getting_started/index.html#running-the-example be sure to use “slam:=True” when launching “tb3_simulation_launch.py” such as:

ros2 launch nav2_bringup tb3_simulation_launch.py slam:=True

Once the Turtlebot Simulation has launch, in a separate window run:

ros2 run nav2_wfd explore