GeRoNa: Generic Robot Navigation

We present GeRoNa (Generic Robot Navigation), a modular navigation framework for wheeled mobile robots. This framework supports many different kinematic configurations of wheeled robots and was experimentally verified on eight different real-world robotic platforms, including Ackermann steering, bi-steerable, skid-steered, differentially-driven and omnidirectional vehicles. The real-world experiments include indoor and outdoor tests, on various terrain types, driving up to 6 m/s. The framework provides A*-based path planning algorithms, high speed obstacle avoidance (tested at speeds up to 2.5 m/s) and twelve different control algorithms for path following. In this paper, we present the whole framework, detail every controller and provide an extensive experimental evaluation of the most important components. The entire framework is already open-source available, written in C++ and based on ROS (Robot Operating System).