Analysis of Local Trajectory Planners for Mobile Robot with Robot Operating System

Abstract

The goal of this work is to analyze and compare trajectory planners for a mobile robot in Robot Operating System (ROS), focusing on the performance of local planners on symmetric and asymmetric environments. In addition, two global planners, Dijkstra and A-star, are implemented in order to have a complete analysis and comprehension of the navigation architecture. Two local planning algorithms, Dynamic Window Approach and Timed Elastic Bands, are analyzed and compared more in depth using the mobile robot TurtleBot 3 Burger, an open-source and low-cost platform. The analyzed criteria were geometric and angular precision of the final position and orientation, time and distance of the complete trajectory, and usage of computational power. Experiments were carried out in two environments with different spatial arrangement of obstacles, with the intention of analyzing the behavior both in simulation with the Gazebo software and in the real robot. Both local planning algorithms enabled the robot to reach the target destination without any collisions, presenting the main difference in the usage of processing power.