Possibility on Nav2 Compatibility / Integration roadmap for Mesh Map & Mesh Navigation

[PhehJingJie]

Hi naturerobots, thanks for open-sourcing Mesh Navigation, the layered Mesh Map and CVP planner are really useful for our outdoor robot on non planar urban outdoor terrain.

In our system we’re also using Nav2 (Jazzy) for behavior trees and higher-level features like Route Server, Coverage Server and Docking Server. It would be amazing if we could combine Nav2’s task-level ecosystem with Mesh Navigation’s mesh-based planning and traversal capabilities.

I understand that mesh_navigation is currently built around Move Base Flex and its own mesh_map representation, so a drop-in integration with Nav2 is non-trivial.

I wanted to ask:

• Is there any ongoing work or roadmap for making Mesh Map–based planners/controllers usable from Nav2 (e.g. via custom planner/controller plugins or some bridge node)?
• From your perspective, is it technically realistic to share a mesh-based representation with Nav2’s costmaps, or would you instead recommend running Mesh Navigation + MBF separately and coordinating at a higher level?
• If such integration is not currently planned, would you be open to design discussions or community contributions in that direction?

My team and I would also be happy to explore contributing or prototyping an integration if it aligns with your roadmap.

Happy to share more details about our use case if that would be useful.

Thanks again for the great work and for any guidance you can share!

[amock]

Hi @PhehJingJie ,

first of all, thanks for your interest! Your use case really sounds like a great match for MeshNav.

Integrating MeshNav/MBF directly into Nav2 isn't straightforward. We examined the interfaces quite a while ago and ultimately decided against it, as some design choices diverged quite a bit from ours. One key point is that the MBF plugin interfaces are strictly map-agnostic; we want to be able to switch between maps, planners, and controllers at runtime depending on the situation. The reverse direction, however, is feasible; we can likely wrap MBF around Nav2 properly, as sketched here: https://github.com/amock/mbf_nav2_connector.

At the moment, there is not a very active roadmap for a native Nav2 integration. That said, we are absolutely open to design discussions or community contributions in this direction.

Additionally, MBF will likely never include BT, SMACH, or any other deliberation layer as a dependency. Instead, MBF is always orchestrated externally by whatever deliberation software you prefer. I have collected a few simple examples illustrating this approach here: https://github.com/amock/mbf_deliberation. This architecture ensures consistent, predefined error codes for all the actions we expose.

In practice, this is how we work and what I would recommend:

• Wrap Nav2 into MBF (probably not exactly the way I have done it) to get shared action interfaces with MeshNav.
• Orchestrate everything from the outside using whatever deliberation software you like, and switch between 3D or 2D maps, planner and controller, depending on the situation.

However, regarding other Nav2 features like the route server or docking, I am not entirely sure. Feel free to try things out and let me know how it goes. We are always happy to hear and discuss new ideas on improving integrations, design, or anything else.