Integration of Global Path Planners in ROS

Global path planning consists in finding a path between two locations in a global map. It is a crucial component for any map-based robot navigation. The navigation stack of the Robot Operating System (ROS) open-source middleware incorporates both global and local path planners to support ROS-enabled robot navigation. Only two basic algorithms are defined for the global path planner including Dijkstra and carrot planners. However, more intelligent global planners have been defined in the literature but were not integrated in ROS distributions. The contribution of this work consists in integrating the \(RA^{*}\) path planner, defined in Chap. 3, into the ROS global path planning component as a plugin. We demonstrate how to integrate new planner into ROS and present their benefits. Extensive experimentations are performed on simulated and real robots to show the effectiveness of the newly integrated planner as compared to ROS default planner.