A ROS~2-based Navigation and Simulation Stack for the Robotino

The Robotino, developed by Festo Didactic, serves as a versatile platform in education and research for mobile robotics tasks. However, there currently is no ROS 2 integration for the Robotino available. In this paper we describe our work on a Webots simulation environment for a Robotino platform extended by LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) sensors. A ROS 2 integration and a pre-configured setup for localization and navigation using existing ROS packages from the Nav2 suite is provided. We validate our setup by comparing simulations with real-world experiments conducted by three Robotinos in a logistics environment in our lab. Additionally, we tested the setup using a ROS 2 hardware driver for the Robotino developed by team GRIPS of the RoboCup Logistics League. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using ROS 2 and Nav2 for navigation tasks on the Robotino platform showing great consistency between simulation and real-world performance.