So, in trying to find the pose of the robot, we stubled upon the fact that we can't in fact issue Navigation Goals because there is no map to reference them from in the bare-bones environment that gmapping runs in.
To resolve this, we have to implement a local planner as a plugin to the existing Navigation stack. On the bright side, when we implement this, it will be the entirety of our solution. On the down side, there are a lot of APIs and configuration files that go into creating a plugin that is a local planner.
So, in trying to find the pose of the robot, we stubled upon the fact that we can't in fact issue Navigation Goals because there is no map to reference them from in the bare-bones environment that gmapping runs in.
To resolve this, we have to implement a local planner as a plugin to the existing Navigation stack. On the bright side, when we implement this, it will be the entirety of our solution. On the down side, there are a lot of APIs and configuration files that go into creating a plugin that is a local planner.
Some places to get started are: