Autonomous Robot Navigation and Localization on 3D Mesh Surfaces in ROS

Presented at ROSCon 2023 by Sebastian Pütz of Nature Robots, DFKI and

Alexander Mock of Osnabrück University.

We present two open-source ROS software stacks that in combination enable a very powerful real-time localization and navigation on an arbitrary 3D surface. Using ray tracing, the robot is localized in real-time on the 3D mesh in 6DoF. Additionally, the Mesh Navigation Stack and Continuous Vector Field Planner (CVP) can be used to compute a shortest path across the surface. CVP is similar to Dijkstra and has the same runtime, but plans over the surface rather than along edges! It calculates a consistent vector field, which is a great advantage for executing the path.