ROS Navigation Tuning Guide

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive guide for fine-tuning ROS navigation parameters to improve robot path planning and movement reliability, emphasizing systematic optimization over trial-and-error methods.

Contribution

It offers a detailed methodology for tuning ROS navigation parameters, filling a knowledge gap for practitioners seeking effective optimization strategies.

Findings

Effective parameter tuning improves navigation reliability.

Guidelines reduce time spent on trial-and-error tuning.

Optimized settings enhance robot safety and efficiency.

Abstract

The ROS navigation stack is powerful for mobile robots to move from place to place reliably. The job of navigation stack is to produce a safe path for the robot to execute, by processing data from odometry, sensors and environment map. Maximizing the performance of this navigation stack requires some fine tuning of parameters, and this is not as simple as it looks. One who is sophomoric about the concepts and reasoning may try things randomly, and wastes a lot of time. This article intends to guide the reader through the process of fine tuning navigation parameters. It is the reference when someone need to know the "how" and "why" when setting the value of key parameters. This guide assumes that the reader has already set up the navigation stack and ready to optimize it. This is also a summary of my work with the ROS navigation stack.