1. Traffic editor — how do you handle curves for a DIFF robot?
Can I double-check whether you’re referring to a differential drive robot or an Ackermann steering robot? Usually differential drive robots can turn in place.
More to your question, we do have a plan to support curves for lanes and robot trajectories in the next generation traffic system. We don’t have any plans to introduce support for curved lanes in the “current generation” since it would require substantial work spread across the traffic editor and rmf_traffic. We’d be open to PRs to introduce these capabilities into the “current generation”, but the core Open-RMF development team is focusing our day-to-day efforts on getting the next generation across the finish line since that will come with far-reaching improvements that are not feasible in the current generation.
2. Is there any standard or convention for mapping in traffic editor?
In case you didn’t see it, there’s a guide on how to build navigation graphs to handle certain recurring needs.
how many waypoints per corridor
You generally shouldn’t insert waypoints that aren’t serving a specific function. Waypoints should be inserted in locations where a robot may need to wait (e.g. wait at a waypoint for traffic to pass before crossing an intersection), or where one traffic lane connects to another traffic lane, or at a position that might be a task destination.
whether unnamed intermediate vertices are fine or if everything should be named
Unnamed vertices are totally fine, especially intermediate vertices. The only downside to not naming a vertex is you won’t be able to use it as a task destination.
coordinate frame mismatches, map origin issues, anything with the transform between the robot map and the RMF nav graph
The traffic editor (and these days the site editor) are meant to help with this. For the traffic editor there’s a guide that explains how to align a robot map with your floor plan and then extract the coordinate transform.
One issue that’s not resolved yet is the fact that maps generated by SLAM can have regional distortions that are not accounted for by a simple linear transformation. There’s an open issue ticket to address this for the site editor, but we don’t currently have any resources committed to it.
4. Anyone running Open-RMF with VDA5050?
I believe @sauk2 has done some extensive work related to this.