The rolling costmap for global then allows you not to have to map this massive space or have a full 1km x 1km costmap in memory.įor completeness from a post on the Slack, the 3 demos I had in mind are as follows: If you're in an open space, the waypoints are dense, or there's a straightline view from each waypoint, then a planner is largely unnecessary and SLAM wouldn't be much additional help, beyond additional robustness in positioning to GPS drift.įor regular interval waypoints in potentially massive (1kmx1km) dynamic environments where its not realistic to map, have the global costmap be rolling with size sufficient to capture the current and next goals to plan within to get around large obstacles that the controller may not be able to reliably navigate around.

If you're in a maze and the waypoints are only defining the end goal, you will probably need a planner to route through the maze to follow the GPS. The case of with SLAM is for increased accuracy and having a map to for a planner to work in if the waypoints are too sparse in a complex environment for the local planner to reliably navigate.

Using RL nav sat transform to create an outdoor GPS waypoint following demo, both with and without fusing in some other mapping methods (v-slam, lidar slam, localizers, etc).

Expert gps waypoint types