Getting Started with the ROS2 Nav2 Stack

When I first opened a Nav2 params file, it felt like reading a config for a piece of software I'd never use again. Costmaps, behavior trees, recovery servers — none of it meant anything until I stopped treating it as one system and started treating it as three separate jobs: knowing where you are, knowing what's around you, and deciding where to go next.

Localization, costmap generation, and planning/control are configured almost independently, and most beginner mistakes come from tuning the wrong one. If your robot is bumping into walls, that's a costmap problem, not a planner problem.

In this post I'll walk through the minimum viable Nav2 setup I use for a new robot, and the three parameters I always tune first before touching anything else.