Navigation package doesn't account for uneven terrain

[ImTitaan]

The current navigation package only creates a 2D occupancy grid of obstacles. This is fine if we were planning to work on flat ground. The terrain around the Mars Desert Research Station is likely going to feature slopes and rocks and other uneven terrain which may cause the rover to get stuck or damaged. An additional cost map layer which takes into consideration how uneven the terrain is would likely be good.

[PumpkinClouds]

Since localization will and can only be done by gps, that leaves the other sensors purely for obstacle avoidance. There exists a nav2 plugin that seems to be able to create a 3D costmap with depth dats. The Spatio Temporal Voxel Layer (STVL) plugin. see documentation and github link for details.

https://docs.nav2.org/tutorials/docs/navigation2_with_stvl.html