How to use tf in more than one robot?

Question

Hi!

I'm trying to do coperative things in between turtlebots. The thing is that first I need both robots in the same core, otherwise they can not interact. But when I put them under the same core I don't know how to solve the tf.

I've tried to push one tf to turtlebot1/tf and the other to turtlebot2/tf, but then I can not see the tf on rviz. Is it correct to do that or do I need a tf which contains all the robots? If i need this how can I start having a look at that to do it?

Thanks!

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Originally posted by apalomer on ROS Answers with karma: 318 on 2012-01-19

Post score: 2

Answer 1

try setting the tf_prefix rosparam in your launch file.

http://ros.org/wiki/geometry/CoordinateFrameConventions#tf_prefix

as a word of caution: having multiple robots on a single master consumes a lot of network bandwidth (especially if they share /tf!), you may run into seemingly strange issues as the result of dropped packets. If you try and scale beyond two robots without throttled topics over a standard 802.11g wifi connection you will definitely run into bandwidth constraints and may be forced to run a single master per robot and foreign relay between them.

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Originally posted by JeffRousseau with karma: 1607 on 2012-01-19

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 5