Hydroponics Robot Part 1 – Troubleshooting Robot Localization Issues

I recently faced a challenge when testing the robot’s ability to navigate back and forth between two rows of pipes. Despite several attempts, the robot kept getting stuck, and I suspected that there might be a localization issue causing it to drift from the map.

I turned to ChatGPT for advice, and it suggested calling global_localization occasionally to resync the lidar with the map. However, when I tried to run the command ros2 run amcl global_localization, I received an error message saying that the package amcl could not be found.

I then noticed that my launch file references nav2_amcl, so I asked ChatGPT if there was a difference between the two packages. After some clarification, ChatGPT suggested running ros2 run nav2_amcl global_localization instead. However, this command also returned an error message saying that no executable was found.

Although this seemed to confuse ChatGPT, I did not give up. I tried running ros2 service call /reinitialize_global_localization std_srvs/srv/Empty, which seemed to do something, but the new location was not accurate at all. In fact, each time I re-ran the command, it picked a random location on the map, which was not consistent.

I plan to continue investigating the global_localization command to see if it can help me resync the lidar with the map. I’ll keep you updated on my progress in future blog posts.

In the meantime, if you’ve faced similar localization issues, I’d love to hear from you. Let me know in the comments how you solved the problem, or if you have any other tips or suggestions.