Inquiry about inter-floor movement

[psi0000]

Hello, I am currently setting up an open-rmf environment.
I would like to ask if there is any feature that allows robots to move between floors without using a lift.

It seems that the system automatically relies on the lift mechanism for inter-floor movement.
However, in my case, I would like to enable floor transitions using something else — for example, an escalator, or even a direct change in the robot’s z-axis position (instant movement).

If such functionality exists, could you please let me know how it can be controlled or implemented?

[mxgrey]

Within the rmf_traffic library, there's nothing to prevent you from connecting waypoints that are on separate levels. Theoretically you could create a waypoint at the bottom of the stairs/escalator (stairs_L1) and then a waypoint at the top of the stairs (stars_L2) and connect them together, like in this diagram:

The only blocker is that the traffic-editor UI doesn't provide a UI for making connections between anchors on different levels. The only reason we don't provide that UI is the core team has never had a use case where it was needed, and we haven't had a community contribution for it.

I would be open to a PR to the traffic-editor or site editor that adds the ability to connect waypoints that are on different floors. I think the hardest part is deciding what the UX should be like. For lifts it's pretty straightforward: We make the lift vertices available to connect to from every floor. For stairs/escalators it's not obvious to me... Should the user have to create a vertex on each level in the right position and then use a special UI tool to connect them? Should there be a tool specifically for drawing stairs/escalators as a special kind of lane?

Alternatively you could choose to do some post-processing on the nav graph that gets generated. You could use a naming convention for your stair-related waypoints, e.g. stair_<name>_bottom / stair_<name>_top , and then you could run a script on the 0.yaml nav graph file that gets generated by the building map generator where you add items to the lanes: array to connect matching endpoints of stair_<name>_bottom / stair_<name>_top. You could also add "docking" events to those lanes if you need the robot to perform a special behavior when going up or down.