Development of an automated benchmark for the analysis of Nav2 controllers

People using walkers, wheelchairs, and crutches or people dealing with debilitating arthritis as well as hip and knee conditions may have difficulty navigating in any kind of environment. The usage of smart wheelchairs has been introduced in order to allow people with reduced mobility to move in public places in a safer and suitable way. Alba Robot srl is a start-up based in Turin, which is developing a cutting-edge micro-mobility platform named SEDIA (Seat Designed for Intelligent Autonomous). It transforms people transportation by using autonomous vehicle fleets navigating in big facilities (e.g. airports, museums and hospitals). One of the most important parts of the software are the Navigation Plugins. Currently the company make use of several of them already provided by the ROS 2 metapackage Nav2: in particular, the controllers (DWB, RPP, TEB, MPPI) are largely exploited even though they are not easily adaptable to every condition. The aim of this paper is to provide an automatic benchmark that is capable of deeply analyze every benefit and drawback of each controller, so that it is possible to acknowledge which one is the best that perfectly deals with any task.