This paper presents an open-source ROS 2 navigation and sensor platform for quadruped robots, demonstrated on Boston Dynamics Spot in a laboratory environment. The platform integrates SLAM Toolbox for mapping and localisation, Navigation2 with MPPI and Smac Hybrid-A* for global path planning, and a frontier-based autonomous exploration module with practical handling of unreachable frontiers. The paper validates and verifies current, open-source algorithms deployed on off-the-shelf hardware. A greedy wavefront-based frontier selection method is presented that prioritizes Time-to-Closest-Viable-Frontier (TCVF) by terminating the search as soon as a feasible frontier is identified. On a real robot dataset replayed across five goal scenarios, the method reduces median selection latency from 94.31 ms to 51.08 ms (95th percentile: 109.54 ms to 56.99 ms), corresponding to a 1.85-times improvement in compute time compared to a standard implementation. The system also employs Zenoh middleware and Foxglove for remote monitoring and control, enabling flexible, high-bandwidth operation. The platform, including configuration files and launch scripts, is released openly to support future research and deployment on quadruped robots.
Brekke et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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