Known Issues

The aim of the Tangobot and its demos is to show that it's possible to navigate autonomously using a single device as sensor, planner, and robot base driver. Here's a list of the most important known issues, which were discovered during the development.

Navigation Stack Behavior

The parameters for the navigation planners are not fine-tuned for high performance navigation. The robotic base controller is not the same as the Kobuki based Turtlebot, so it doesn't have a velocity smoother nor multiplexer.

Proposals:

• Tests showed that the velocity smoother improves the behavior of the standard Turtlebot. Adding this component to Tangobot would improve its performance too.
• A velocity multiplexer would allow to give other sources of commands (like teleoperation or safety controllers) more priority than the navigation stack.
• The navigation stack configuration (mainly global and local planners) can be adjusted for faster responses.

ROS Master on Device

The Rosjava master node has some limitations. In particular, it is incompatible with desktop / Linux roslaunch (details on this issue.

This is a problem when launching the Desktop visualizer for the demo, so for now this tutorial requires launching the ROS Master on Desktop.

Solution: Rosjava is missing the 'system.multicall' implementation. When this is fixed, it will be possible to use desktop launchfiles with a Rosjava master.

Another option is to avoid using roslaunch with the Rosjava master, by using an android client app to visualize the map and send goals (Map Nav), or using rosrun manually for particular required desktop nodes.

USB device recognition in Zenfone

If you plug the USB OTG before running the application as stated in the instructions, the phone might not recognize the robot base the first time. If the popup that asks for your permission doesn't appear, unplug and plug the USB from the robot base. The popup should appear after plugging the cable back again.

Other issues

See the issue tracker for a complete list of opened issues, ongoing developments, and discussions. Feel free to open a new issue if you find something that is not listed, or to propose new features.

You can also use the official Ros Answers site to post your question.

Click here to go to Tangobot's Main Page.