mrpt_path_planning

Path planning and navigation algorithms for robots/vehicles moving on planar environments. This library builds upon mrpt-nav and the theory behind PTGs to generate libraries of “motion primitives” for vehicles with arbitrary shape and realistic kinematics and dynamics.

The planner optimizes SE(2) path cost (position + heading), not R(2) path length. For vehicles that rotate, arriving at a goal with the correct heading is part of the optimal solution — paths that are longer in Euclidean distance but better-aligned may genuinely have lower cost. See TPS_Astar.h for details on the cost model.

Status on ROS build farm

Distro	Build dev	Build releases	Stable version
ROS 2 Humble (u22.04)
ROS 2 Jazzy @ u24.04
ROS 2 Kilted @ u24.04
ROS 2 Lyrical (u26.04)
ROS 2 Rolling (u26.04)

EOL Distro	Last version
ROS 1 Noetic (u20.04)
ROS 2 Iron (u22.04)

Package layout

This repository is split into three colcon/ROS 2 packages:

• mrpt_path_planning_core: the headless C++ path-planning library (PTGs, TPS_Astar, NavEngine, TrajectoryFollower, …). No GUI/display dependency — depends only on mrpt_libmaps, mrpt_libnav, mrpt_libgraphs, mrpt_libcontainers, mrpt_libtclap.
• mrpt_path_planning_apps: the CLI and GUI applications (path-planner-cli, which opens a 3D viz window, and selfdriving-simulator-gui, which requires mvsim). Depends on mrpt_path_planning_core plus mrpt_libgui and mvsim.
• mrpt_path_planning: a backward-compatible metapackage with no code of its own — it just depends on the two packages above, so existing <depend>mrpt_path_planning</depend> consumers keep working unchanged. New consumers that only need the algorithms should depend on mrpt_path_planning_core directly to avoid pulling in mrpt_libgui.

Build requisites

• MRPT (>=2.12.0)
• mvsim (optional to run the live control simulator).
• colcon — this repo is colcon-only; there is no standalone top-level CMake build.

In Ubuntu 22.04 or newer, installed it with:

sudo apt install libmrpt-dev python3-colcon-common-extensions

For older versions of Ubuntu:

# MRPT from this PPA (or build from sources if preferred, or from ROS package `mrpt2`):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:joseluisblancoc/mrpt
sudo apt update
sudo apt install libmrpt-dev python3-colcon-common-extensions

Build (from the directory containing this repo, e.g. a colcon workspace src/):

colcon build --base-paths .
source install/setup.bash

Use in your code

From your CMake script:

find_package(mrpt_path_planning_core REQUIRED)   # or mrpt_path_planning for backward compat
target_link_libraries(YOUR_TARGET mpp::mrpt_path_planning)

And in package.xml, prefer <depend>mrpt_path_planning_core</depend> unless you also need the CLI/GUI apps.

Demo runs

path-planner-cli

Dump default planner parameters to a YAML file for inspection or customization:

path-planner-cli --write-planner-parameters my-planner-params.yaml

Plan a path for a holonomic robot with an SE(2) goal pose (x y heading_deg),

File truncated at 100 lines see the full file