ROS based service robot platform

The substitution of a human factor by an affordable low-cost robotic system has been increasing recently. The reason being, the robot is expected to do less errors than a human does and does not have a will of its own. This paper proposes a service robot platform that is capable of mapping, localizing itself and navigating in an indoor environment and is best suited for structured environment with static obstacles. The approach used for mapping is a ROS package which is a ROS wrapper of Real Time Appearance Based Mapping with the help of a low cost RGB-D camera, the Microsoft Kinect XBOX 360 with a turtlebot robot model for visualization. RTAB-Map takes into account loop closure in real time constraints with a memory management technique which makes the mapping process independent of time and size. Once the mapping is done and the 2D projection of the map is obtained of our real indoor environment of the lab, the simulation of the autonomous navigation of the robot model to the desired location is done on Gazebo. For the navigation to happen successfully, Adaptive Monte Carlo Localization is used for localizing the turtlebot model in the map. The simulation results were visualized using rviz and were found to be satisfactory.