Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming - Second Edition

Implementing autonomous navigation using amcl and a static map

The ROS amcl package provides nodes for localizing the robot on a static map. The amcl node subscribes the laser scan data, laser scan based maps, and the TF information from the robot. The amcl node estimates the pose of the robot on the map and publishes its estimated position with respect to the map.

If we create a static map from the laser scan data, the robot can autonomously navigate from any pose of the map using amcl and the move_base nodes. The first step is to create a launch file for starting the amcl node. The amcl node is highly customizable; we can configure it with a lot of parameters. The list of parameters are available at the ROS package site (http://wiki.ros.org/amcl ...