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Beluga: A Modern Monte Carlo Localization Package for ROS and ROS 2

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European Robotics Forum 2024 (ERF 2024)

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 32))

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Abstract

We present beluga_amcl, a novel Robot Operating System (ROS) localization package that implements Adaptive Monte Carlo localization (AMCL), one of the most widely used algorithms for map-based localization in the ROS navigation stack.

The beluga_amcl package is fully compatible with the long-known and widely used nav2_amcl package, but stands out in that it was designed from the ground-up to be high-quality, production grade open-source software, in line with current expectations of the ROS 2 community.

In this paper we demonstrate that beluga_amcl is a robust and performant implementation of the features in nav2_amcl, and that it can thus be considered a suitable functional replacement for it. This provides the ROS community with a modern, high-quality, and backwards-compatible MCL package that can be a basis for further extension.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    evo (https://github.com/MichaelGrupp/evo) and timememory (https://github.com/NERSC/timemory) were used for data capture and evaluation.

References

  1. beluga_amcl compatibility notes. https://github.com/Ekumen-OS/beluga/blob/31445270321482c72dc8a7608385a0682880151b/beluga_amcl/docs/PARAMETERS.md. Accessed 10 Oct 2023

  2. Ros 2 developer guide. https://docs.ros.org/en/rolling/The-ROS2-Project/Contributing/Developer-Guide.html#ros-2-developer-guide. Accessed 19 Oct 2010

  3. Macenski, S., Foote, T., Gerkey, B., Lalancette, C., Woodall, W.: Robot operating system 2: design, architecture, and uses in the wild. Sci. Robot. 7(66), eabm6074 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abm6074, https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/scirobotics.abm6074

  4. Quigley, M., et al.: ROS: an open-source robot operating system (2009)

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  5. Thrun, S., Burgard, W., Fox, D.: Probabilistic Robotics. Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series. MIT Press (2005). https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=jtSMEAAAQBAJ

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Correspondence to Gerardo Puga .

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Puga, G., Espinosa, N., Hidalgo, M., García, O., Paunovic, I. (2024). Beluga: A Modern Monte Carlo Localization Package for ROS and ROS 2. In: Secchi, C., Marconi, L. (eds) European Robotics Forum 2024. ERF 2024. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-76424-0_23

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