(NAV-1380) Feature: velocity smoother

[arekin19]

Purpose

Serena's movements are not smooth. Especially after re-planning around obstacles, trajectory changes and robot is doing jerky moves.

Approach

ros-planning/navigation2 on main introduced package velocity_smoother: link. We are cherry-picking it with small adaptation to make it work with old version of Life-cycle Node. Added remapping allows to use it with multiplexer input.

"The aim of this package is to implement velocity, acceleration, and dead band smoothing from Nav2 to reduce wear-and-tear on robot motors and hardware controllers by smoothing out the accelerations/jerky movements that might be present with some local trajectory planners' control efforts." NAV2 documentation

Package is scaling incoming velocity commands to keep accelerations and deceleration within given bounds and maintain the trajectory. All components of velocity are scaled proportionally to a component that require changes due to acceleration limits. Package supports dynamically reconfigurable parameters.

Testing

Results described here: serena_bringup/109

Open Questions and Pre-Merge TODOs

n/a

Dependencies

• #serena_bringup/109
• #microros_stm32e407/22

Disclaimers

n/a

Learning

• Source readme
• NAV2 documentation

Additional documentation

System Architecture, section 1.1.4.2 Velocity Smoother

Blog Posts

• How to Pull Request Github Repo with Learning focused Pull Request Template.