Today we are releasing our foundation ROS Stacks: Common and Geometry. We are also releasing initial versions of Navigation and Slam Gmapping, which are a critical pieces of functionality that have been heavily tested over the past year. Most recently, the Navigation Stack passed the Milestone 2 requirement of 26.2 miles of error-free indoor navigation. All of these stacks are being released with the 0.1 designation: we intend to have stable releases of each of these soon, but due to their central role in any robot software system, they are undergoing heavy user testing and their documentation is being improved.
We are also working on a new install system for ROS to handle automated installation of these stacks.
Summary of stacks:
- common: Common contains ROS Packages that have common use across a wide variety of functional areas, including C++ plugins, a robot action API, and wrappers for bfl, yaml-cpp and tinyxml.
- geometry: Geometry's most importantly provides the tf package, which defines how ROS nodes communicate about coordinate frames of the robot. Geometry also contains ROS wrappers for KDL, Eigen, and Bullet.
- slam_gmapping: slam_gmapping contains the gmapping package, which is a ROS wrapper around GMapping from the OpenSLAM project. Gmapping enables you to use laser range data to construct maps.
- navigation: The Navigation Stack provides autonomous navigation capabilities to differential drive and holonomic wheeled robots. It has been heavily tested on the PR2 robot within an indoor office environment.
As you can see from the descriptions above, these stacks incorporate code from many other open source projects, including Orocos, Eigen, Bullet, OpenSLAM, Poco, yaml-cpp, Player, and tinyxml. We are grateful to these projects for providing useful libraries to build upon.
Downloads:
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