Regulated pure pursuit for robot path tracking

The accelerated deployment of service robots have spawned a number of algorithm variations to better handle real-world conditions. Many local trajectory planning techniques have been deployed on practical robot systems successfully. While most formulations of Dynamic Window Approach and Model Predictive Control can progress along paths and optimize for additional criteria, the use of pure path tracking algorithms is still commonplace. Decades later, Pure Pursuit and its variants continues to be one of the most commonly utilized classes of local trajectory planners. However, few Pure Pursuit variants have been proposed with schema for variable linear velocities—they either assume a constant velocity or fails to address the point at all. This paper presents a variant of Pure Pursuit designed with additional heuristics to regulate linear velocities, built atop the existing Adaptive variant. The Regulated Pure Pursuit algorithm makes incremental improvements on state of the art by adjusting linear velocities with particular focus on safety in constrained and partially observable spaces commonly negotiated by deployed robots. We present experiments with the Regulated Pure Pursuit algorithm on industrial-grade service robots. We also provide a high-quality reference implementation that is freely included ROS 2 Nav2 framework at https://github.com/ros-planning/navigation2 for fast evaluation.