Rover Autonav

Autonomous navigation for a 6-wheel differential drive rover using a ZED 2i camera, Nav2, and Foxglove visualization.

Prerequisites

• Jetson AGX Orin with JetPack 5
• ROS 2 Humble
• ZED SDK (from Stereolabs)

Setup

source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash
./setup.sh

Usage

source install/setup.bash

# Full launch (with motors)
ros2 launch rover_autonav autonav.launch.py

# Without motor driver
ros2 launch rover_autonav autonav.launch.py enable_motors:=false

Connect Foxglove to ws://<jetson-ip>:8765. Click in the 3D panel to send navigation goals.

Architecture

ZED 2i (VIO + PointCloud2) → Nav2 voxel costmaps (height-aware 2.5D) → /cmd_vel → Motor Driver
                                                                                  ↓
                                        Foxglove Bridge ← all topics ← 6x motor nodes

• Odometry: ZED visual-inertial odometry (no wheel encoders needed)
• Planning: Nav2 with NavFn planner + DWB differential drive controller
• Costmaps: Rolling window, fed by ZED point cloud through Nav2 voxel layers
• Visualization: Foxglove bridge with topic whitelist (~15-25 Mbps)