The ROS 2 Navigation Stack: A practical guide to planning safe routes and dodging obstacles in real-time

Build Autonomous Robots That Can Plan Safe Routes, Avoid Obstacles, and Navigate Dynamic Environments with ROS 2Autonomous navigation is more than moving from one point to another.A robot must understand its surroundings, estimate its position, build reliable maps, plan efficient routes, react to unexpected obstacles, recover from failures, and continuously make safe decisions while operating in changing environments.The ROS 2 Navigation Stack is a practical, project-based guide to mastering Nav2-the official ROS 2 navigation framework used to build autonomous mobile robots. From simulation to deployment, you'll learn how the complete navigation pipeline works and how to configure, troubleshoot, optimize, and extend it for real-world applications.Rather than treating Nav2 as a collection of launch files and configuration parameters, this book explains how every component works together: Localization → Mapping → Costmaps → Global Planning → Local Planning → Controller → Recovery → Goal AchievementWhether you're building warehouse robots, service robots, delivery platforms, research robots, autonomous rovers, or educational mobile robots, this guide provides a structured path to reliable autonomous navigation.Inside you'll learn how to: - Understand the ROS 2 Navigation Stack architecture- Install and configure Nav2- Build ROS 2 workspaces- Configure robot models- Prepare navigation-ready URDF models- Understand coordinate frames- Configure TF2 transforms- Build reliable transform trees- Configure robot localization- Fuse sensor data- Understand Extended Kalman Filters- Configure odometry sourcesBy the end of the book, you'll understand not only how the Navigation Stack works, but how to build autonomous robots capable of planning safe routes, avoiding obstacles, recovering from failures, and operating reliably in real-world environments.Whether you're a robotics student, ROS developer, research engineer, automation specialist, or autonomous systems developer, The ROS 2 Navigation Stack provides the practical experience needed to transform simulation-ready robots into dependable autonomous systems.