OBSTACLE AVOID FOR PR2

LASER OBSTACLE AVOIDANCE FOR PR2

One of the basic behaviour a budding roboticist often starts with is obstacle avoidance using sonar or laser scan. While playing with gazebo simulations, we realised that we are yet to try out a very basic laser obstacle avoidance behaviour in the PR2 robot employing the SICK laser. It was not long that we wrote our codes and made our ROS package and started with simulations in gazebo. A surprise awaited us ........

WHAT THE HELL !!!! 

We got an empty world with PR2 and then filled it up with boxes and set our code into action. Much to our surprise the PR2 robot did not try to avoid those boxes, but push them rather awkwardly. 

BOX PUSHING INSTEAD OF OBSTACLE AVOIDANCE

It was after few such 'failed attempts' and cursing our code incessantly that we realised that the issue is with the stretched out arms of the PR2. The distance for the obstacle avoidance to work is at min_range<=0.5, however we never had accounted for the PR2's arms while coding so the obstacle avoidance code is not coming to fore and is restricted by the arm lengths. Thus when the PR2 reaches the obstacle it continues to move and 'push' the obstacles, since gazebo is a physics based simulator thus in a box world it reflects such as a 'box pushing' behaviour. It may be said that such a behaviour arises in the 'emergent' context. Playing around with the code, we finally set it to, min_range<=1.2 which sorted out the issue.

The codes discussed here can be found at, https://github.com/Arkapravo/laser_obstacle_avoidance_pr2, feel free to write to us at Arkapravo Bhaumik (arkapravobhaumik at gmail dot com) and Koushik Kabiraj (koushik dot atti at gmail dot com).