Racing With ROS 2 A Navigation System for an Autonomous Formula Student
  Race Car
Alastair Bradford Grant van Breda Tobias Fischer
The advent of autonomous vehicle technologies has significantly impacted
various sectors, including motorsport, where Formula Student and Formula:
Society of Automotive Engineers introduced autonomous racing classes. These
offer new challenges to aspiring engineers, including the team at QUT
Motorsport, but also raise the entry barrier due to the complexity of
high-speed navigation and control. This paper presents an open-source solution
using the Robot Operating System 2, specifically its open-source navigation
stack, to address these challenges in autonomous Formula Student race cars. We
compare off-the-shelf navigation libraries that this stack comprises of against
traditional custom-made programs developed by QUT Motorsport to evaluate their
applicability in autonomous racing scenarios and integrate them onto an
autonomous race car. Our contributions include quantitative and qualitative
comparisons of these packages against traditional navigation solutions, aiming
to lower the entry barrier for autonomous racing. This paper also serves as a
comprehensive tutorial for teams participating in similar racing disciplines
and other autonomous mobile robot applications.