Dynamic Path Planning of a mobile robot adopting a costmap layer approach in ROS2

Mobile robots can highly contribute to achieve the production flexibility envisaged by the Industry 4.0 paradigm, provided that they show an adequate level of autonomy to operate in a typical industrial environment, in which the presence of both static and dynamic obstacles must be managed. Robot Operating System (ROS) is a well known open-source platform for the development of robotic applications, recently updated to the enhanced ROS2 version, including a navigation stack (Nav2) providing most, but not all the capabilities required to a mobile robot operating in an industrial environment. In particular, it does not embed a strategy for dynamic obstacle handling. Aim of this paper is to enhance Nav2 through the development of a Dynamic Obstacle Layer, as a plug and play solution suitable for the integration of the dynamic obstacle information acquired by a generic 2D LiDAR sensor. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is validated through a campaign of simulation tests, carried out in Webots for a TurtleBot3 burger robot, equipped with a RPLIDAR A3 LiDAR sensor.