Trajectory Following

This package exposes the the /follow_path action server that, when called, commands the robot along the desired path. The request, response, and feedback definitions can be found here.

Note: Currently, the server is set up to call an implementation of the pure pursuit algorithm to achieve this. However, it is also set up so that we can (somewhat) easily drop in another path tracking implementation in the future. However, to do this correctly, this would require the creation of a PathTrackingAlgorithm interface and a refactor of how we set parameters.

The action server is set up to be configurable. See config/pure_pursuit_config.yaml for all of the available parameters. The default values are shown below.

These default values will be used if the parameter is not defined in the specified config file.

There are also a couple debug outputs.

• The pure pursuit lookahead point is published to the /carrot topic.
• A circle representing the lookahead distance is published to the /lookahead_circle topic.

Both of these outputs can be visualized in rviz. There is also a rviz configuration file (/rviz/navigation.rviz) in the repo that will configure your rviz to visualize all of the outputs from the navigation stack (including path planning). This is useful for debugging purposes.