Question About Multi-Floor Navigation Using Stairs and Legged Robots in Open-RMF

[RafaelAlvarezz]

Hello,

I’m a Brazilian Electrical Engineering student working on a project that involves multiple floors and robots.

I know that in RMF there is support for multi-floor navigation using lifts. However, in my case, the robots need to move between floors using stairs, as the environment is an oil refinery without lifts or elevators.

Is there any way to configure RMF or integrate a plugin that allows robots to navigate between floors using stairs? For example, creating a route that starts on L1 and ends on L2, but instead of using lifts, the robot would use stairs.

Additionally, I’d like to know if using legged robots is compatible with RMF. Can I simulate legged robot models without issues?

Thank you in advance for your support!

[arjo129]

As of now, to the best of my knowledge we don't support stairs. I don;t know if legged robots would be different in any way other than stairs. One way to work around would be to just assume everything is on the same floor. This assumes you don't have lifts in the mix.

[mxgrey]

Open-RMF itself doesn't care how a robot moves between floors, it just needs to know that the connection exists in the nav graph.

The traffic-editor just doesn't have a way to express this in the UI, and neither does the next-gen site editor. I expect we'll eventually implement it for the site editor, but we have no plans to add more features to the traffic-editor.

If someone wants to open a PR adding this ability to the traffic-editor, I wouldn't oppose it. You'd just need to add some kind of UI that describes a connection between two points that exist on different floors, or perhaps add a vertex property (e.g. stairs) so you can give the same stairs property value to all vertices that belong to the same staircase. Then when generating the nav graph you would create a "lane" between all vertices with the same stairs value.

[mxgrey]

Can I simulate legged robot models without issues?

Open-RMF doesn't care about the mode of locomotion for a robot, and we've done pilot demos with legged robots in the past. The catch is you'd need to introduce your own fleet adapter to command your legged robot, and you'd need to use your own navigation system in the simulation.

The "slotcar" plugin that we use to simulate wheeled mobile robots wouldn't be compatible with legged robots. But there's no requirement to use our "slotcar" plugin to simulate. If your legged robot is compatible with Nav2 then you may be able to use the free_fleet adapter, even in simulation.