Path Optimization by Elastic Band

Visiting scholar Christian Connette from Fraunhofer IPA has just finished up his projects here at Willow Garage. Christian works on the Care-O-bot 3 robot platform, which shares many ROS libraries in common with the PR2 robot. While he was here at Willow Garage, he worked on implementing an "elastic band" approach (Quinlan and Khatib) for the ROS navigation stack. You can watch the video above to find out more about this work, or checkout the slides below for more technical details (download PDF). The software is available as open source in the eband_local_planner package on ROS.org.