I was following the Nav2 tutorial for setting up a robot which works as expected for a diff drive (the white front wheels are due to diffdrive not publishing transformation for these, that's ok):
Then, i replaced the diffdrive plugin for my use case with the ackermann plugin, however, all transformations are empty and the wheels/links all collapse to the base_link:
Using my URDF and with the joint_state_publisher_gui without Gazebo works as expected:
The plugin is set up as specified in its docs:
<gazebo>
<plugin name="gazebo_ros_ackermann_drive" filename="libgazebo_ros_ackermann_drive.so">
<ros>
<namespace>/demo</namespace>
<!-- <remapping>cmd_vel:=cmd_demo</remapping> -->
<!-- <remapping>odom:=odom_demo</remapping> -->
<!-- <remapping>distance:=distance_demo</remapping> -->
<!-- <parameter name="cmd_vel_topic" value="cmd_demo"/> -->
<!-- <parameter name="odom_topic" value="odom_demo"/> -->
<!-- <parameter name="distance_topic" value="distance_demo"/> -->
</ros>
<update_rate>100.0</update_rate>
<!-- wheels -->
<front_left_joint>front_left_wheel_joint</front_left_joint>
<front_right_joint>front_right_wheel_joint</front_right_joint>
<rear_left_joint>rear_left_wheel_joint</rear_left_joint>
<rear_right_joint>rear_right_wheel_joint</rear_right_joint>
<left_steering_joint>front_left_steer_joint</left_steering_joint>
<right_steering_joint>front_right_steer_joint</right_steering_joint>
<steering_wheel_joint>steering_joint</steering_wheel_joint>
<!-- Max absolute steer angle for tyre in radians-->
<!-- Any cmd_vel angular z greater than this would be capped -->
<max_steer>0.6458</max_steer>
<!-- Max absolute steering angle of steering wheel -->
<max_steering_angle>7.85</max_steering_angle>
<!-- Max absolute linear speed in m/s -->
<max_speed>20</max_speed>
<!-- PID tuning -->
<left_steering_pid_gain>1500 0 1</left_steering_pid_gain>
<left_steering_i_range>0 0</left_steering_i_range>
<right_steering_pid_gain>1500 0 1</right_steering_pid_gain>
<right_steering_i_range>0 0</right_steering_i_range>
<linear_velocity_pid_gain>1000 0 1</linear_velocity_pid_gain>
<linear_velocity_i_range>0 0</linear_velocity_i_range>
<!-- output -->
<publish_odom>true</publish_odom>
<publish_odom_tf>true</publish_odom_tf>
<publish_distance>true</publish_distance>
<!-- disable tf -->
<publish_wheel_tf>true</publish_wheel_tf>
<odometry_frame>odom</odometry_frame>
<robot_base_frame>base_link</robot_base_frame>
</plugin>
</gazebo>
If someone has a suggestion why diffdrive works as expected and ackermann does not, i would highly appreciate some pointers, i already excluded the STL bug in the ackermann plugin.
