clearAroundRobot and clearExceptRobot are limited to costmap bounds - STVL voxel area clearing mismatch

[tonynajjar]

With clearExceptRobot and clearAroundRobot, we enforce the start and end point to be in the costmap and we pass these to STVL's clearArea. Because of that we can't reliably control the clearing (or lack thereof) of STVL's voxels e.g. with clearAroundRobot we can't clear voxels outside the costmap or with clearExceptRobot, we can't exclude voxels outside the costmap from clearing.
With clearEntire, it is not a problem because we call resetLayers() which resets the whole grid here
Not really sure what the generic solution would be here; is there any other layer to your knowledge that stores data outside the costmap bounds?

See SteveMacenski/spatio_temporal_voxel_layer#320 for complete discussion

[SteveMacenski]

This is a good first issue for users; essentially a user could request a clearing operation around the robot that exceeds the side of the local costmap. In that case, we should just clear the entire costmap rather than reducing the size to the costmap's size.

This is the main function which needs to be modified https://github.com/ros-navigation/navigation2/blob/main/nav2_costmap_2d/src/clear_costmap_service.cpp#L126-L146 and the call for totally clearing the costmap is clearEntirely().

More context:

Oh.. your radius is set generally larger than your local costmap size? ... We could check in Costmap2D if that's the case and clear the local costmap completely since that should be an eq. operation in the case that radius >= costmap_size_x That should handle your comments in STVL implicitly

[leander-dsouza]

Hey Steve, I have taken a stab at this at #5010.