Navigation stack for the crawler robot Servosila Engineer

Abstract

Navigation is one of the most critical problems in all areas of mobile robotics, including urban search and rescue robotics. Autonomous navigation tasks appear almost in every robotic project. A preliminary validation on a new navigation algorithm could be efficiently performed within a simulator, which allows constructing any type of an environment and simulate different operational conditions for a robot. Therefore a development of an appropriate simulated robot model and its navigation capabilities within a simulator are recently in a focus of many research teams. This article presents a number of improvements to the Gazebo simulator model of the crawler robot Servosila Engineer and a newly developed navigation stack. The navigation stack was validated with the robot's model in the Gazebo and with a real robot in a laboratory environment.