Using Beluga with Nav2

Overview

Nav2 is a ROS 2 framework that includes several components for robot navigation. One of these components is the localization system, typically nav2_amcl.

This tutorial will demonstrate how to use beluga_amcl instead of nav2_amcl for a simulated TurtleBot 3 on ROS 2 Humble. You may also try Beluga on other supported ROS 2 versions, with different types of robots.

Bring the code

Clone beluga-demos repository

The beluga-demos public repository contains the beluga_demo_nav2_integration package, among others.

Clone it into a workspace:

mkdir -p ~/beluga_demo_ws/src
cd ~/beluga_demo_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/Ekumen-OS/beluga-demos.git

For this tutorial, we will only use the beluga_demo_nav2 package in that repository. This package contains all the necessary files to launch the simulation.

Check beluga_demo_nav2_integration package

Since beluga_amcl is feature-wise compatible with nav2_amcl (as thoroughly discussed in the beluga_amcl ROS 2 reference page), we can just swap beluga_amcl for nav2_amcl:

Loading beluga_amcl composable node, instead of nav2_amcl’s.

That is what the beluga_demo_nav2_integration package does. Even the same parameter file can be used without changes, though the beluga_demo_nav2_integration does apply a few minimal changes to better configure beluga_amcl, as explained in its reference page.

Run the code

To keep things as simple as possible, the beluga-demos repository comes with a containerized environment for demo execution:

cd beluga-demos
./docker/run.sh

Once inside, you can build all demos with:

demo_build

You can also make do without containers. You will have to install ROS 2 Humble and rosdep install demo dependencies before you can colcon build it:

source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash
cd ~/beluga_demo_ws
rosdep install -i -y --from-path src
colcon build --symlink-install --packages-up-to beluga_demo_nav2_integration

After building, you can launch the demo with:

source install/setup.bash
ros2 launch beluga_demo_nav2_integration demo_office_navigation.launch.py

This is equivalent to the nav2_integration_demo command that is available within the beluga-demos container.

You should see Gazebo open up an office scenario with a TurtleBot in it. You should also see rviz2 open with the corresponding map loaded.

Attention

If the robot is not spawned in gazebo, check the GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH environment variable set in the beluga_demo_nav2_launch.py file.

You can use rviz2 tools to navigate the robot around the map.