Special project : Husky robot navigation with ROS

Abstract

Robotics presence has been noticed more and more each day. Robotics quality and effectiveness has increased exponentially in the last decades. Nowadays, one of the most common and useful kind of robot is mobile robots due to the wide range of tasks they are able to develop. Moreover, autonomous mobile robots have been the main topic of research in the recent years. Some of their applications can be shown in recovering disaster efforts, research fields and even service robots. This project aims to show and explain how to approach one of the main issues in autonomous robotics, robot navigation in an unknown environment. To accomplish that, this project will present a simulation of a Husky robot navigating through an environment where there is no prior acknowledge about it. To face this problem, the technique of SLAM will be used for localization and mapping. This simulation will be done by using ROS, currently one of the most popular tool to code robot software. Specifically, it will be the Indigo version. In this report, there will be summarized a brief introduction to the main topics such as the Husky robot, ROS, navigation and SLAM. Then, the software used will be explained part by part. To continue, an implementation of the software and an explanation about how to execute it will be shown. Lastly, the conclusion, learnings and possible next steps will be presented at the end of this report.