Path Planning with Nav2

Bipedal Humanoid Movement

Navigating a humanoid robot is more complex than a wheeled robot. We need to consider footstep planning and stability. We will use Nav2, the industry-standard navigation stack for ROS 2.

The Nav2 Architecture

Nav2 uses Behavior Trees to manage the complex logic of navigation.

• Planner Server: Computes a global path from A to B (e.g., using A* or Dijkstra).
• Controller Server: Computes local velocity commands to follow the global path while avoiding dynamic obstacles (e.g., using MPPI or DWB).
• Recovery Server: Executes behaviors to get the robot unstuck (e.g., backing up, spinning).

Configuring for Humanoids

For a humanoid, we might treat it as a circle for collision checking, but we need a custom controller that outputs walking gait parameters instead of simple wheel velocities.

# nav2_params.yaml snippet
controller_server:
  ros__parameters:
    FollowPath:
      plugin: "dwb_core::DWBLocalPlanner"
      max_vel_x: 0.5
      max_vel_theta: 1.0