ROS2 package port for multi robot exploration of [m-explore](https://github.com/hrnr/m-explore). Currently tested on Eloquent, Dashing, Foxy, and Galactic distros.
This package works with known and unknown initial poses of the robots. It merges the maps of the robots and publishes the merged map. Some results in simulation:
Because of the logic that merges the maps, currently as a straightforward port to ROS2 from the ROS1 version, the SLAM needs to be done using the ROS1 defacto slam option which is [slam_gmapping](https://github.com/ros-perception/slam_gmapping), which hasn't been ported officially to ROS2 yet. There is an unofficial port but it lacks to pass a namespace to its launch file. For that, this repo was tested with one of the authors of this package [fork](https://github.com/charlielito/slam_gmapping/tree/feature/namespace_launch). You'll need to git clone to your workspace and build it with colcon.
To spawn multiple robots, you need the `nav2_gazebo_spawner` which does not come up with the `nav2-bringup` installation. For that, install it with `sudo apt install ros-${ROS_DISTRO}-nav2-gazebo-spawner`.
This repo has some config examples and launch files for running this package with 2 TB3 robots and a world with nav2. Nonetheless, they are only compatible with the galactic branch and since some breaking changes were introduced in this branch, if you want to try it with another ros2 distro you'll need to tweak those param files for that nav2's distro version (which shouldn't be hard).
By default, the demo runs with known initial poses. You can change that by launching again both launch commands with the flag `known_init_poses:=False`
