Author: Zen and the Art of Computer Programming
With the widespread application of intelligent robots, especially in various fields such as transportation, dispatching, and assistance, the navigation ability of robots is crucial for them to efficiently perform tasks in complex environments. Currently, the most mainstream robot navigation systems mainly integrate lidar and IMU ranging modules to estimate the robot's position by calculating the relationship with the environment. However, these traditional methods have many limitations, such as being unable to cope with the deformation, occlusion, uncertainty of dynamic objects, and target recognition in complex scenes. In recent years, with the development of machine vision technology, robot navigation based on computer vision has developed rapidly. ROS (Robot Operating System) is an open source robot development framework that can realize robot programming control, communication and decision-making, and supports different types of sensors and transmission mechanisms. This article will use ROS as a research platform, combine computer vision and path planning technology, explore and solve problems in vision-based robot navigation, and improve navigation accuracy and real-time performance.
2. Explanation of basic concepts and terms
2.1 ROS（Robot Operating System）
ROS is an open source robot operating system and one of the most popular robot development frameworks. It allows developers to develop robot-related software more conveniently and supports a variety of sensors, interfaces and transmission mechanisms. It is composed of famous scientific researchers such as Arthur De Monk, Thomas Guiller, Daniel Boeser, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Kirkland, John Reed, Patrick Solden, etc. Developed jointly by personnel. It is highly flexible, scalable and cross-platform and has been adopted by many well-known enterprises and institutions. ROS provides a node-based message passing model, which makes data exchange between different modules very simple, thereby reducing the difficulty of development. At the same time, it also provides a complete set of toolkits, including topic publishing/subscription, parameter server, service calling, etc., to facilitate developers to carry out interactive programming.