How to Properly Orient Kinect Data from Turtlebot in RVIZ?

Question

This has been bugging me for a while now, and it's starting to make things quite difficult.

The point cloud data (and, if I remember correctly, stuff like odometry data) from the Turtlebot come in with 'depth' oriented along the z-axis, while 'depth' relative to the Turtlebot lies in the x/y-plane.

How do I get this to display and work properly together, especially in rviz?

Currently in rviz, the point cloud emanates from the 'top' of the Turtlebot, and points up in the air.

I'm sure there's got to be some sort of quick solution to this, so I figured I'd better ask before I go writing all of my own nodes and stuff to try to compensate for it.

My best guess is that there's some simple setup stuff I'm not doing properly or whatever. If there isn't actually a 'solution' to this because it's not a problem for you --if it 'just works' for you-- would you kindly walk me through how you set up/run your Turtlebot? I'm pretty sure I'm following the Turtlebot bringup tutorials and everything properly... but they don't talk about making it work with rviz, from what I can tell.

Thanks in advance!

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Originally posted by Yo on ROS Answers with karma: 183 on 2012-01-11

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by mmwise on 2012-01-27:
When the TurtleBot runs out of the box in rviz you should see the kinect pointcloud in front of the TurtleBot as shown in this video http://www.ros.org/wiki/turtlebot/Tutorials/Looking%20at%20Camera%20Data . It might be that your fixed frame is messed up somehow is it set to base_link?

Comment by patrick_hammer on 2012-02-19:
Works out of the box for me - does your robot model look correct in rviz?

Answer 1

I haven't used the turtlebot yet, but as a hack you could change the kinect frame/link in the URDF file, which contains the model description of the turtlebot. Just change the orientation according to your needs. But as you already hinted, there might be a better solution, since the other turtlebot users seem to have no complains about this ...

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Originally posted by bit-pirate with karma: 2062 on 2012-01-11

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by Yo on 2012-01-12:
Right, thanks. I'd definitely like a nicer solution though -- I'm not all that experienced with ROS or anything, so even the 'simple' solution of modifying the URDF file would be a bit difficult for me, I'm afraid. >_< That's why I'm guessing there's just something simple I'm missing. Thanks though!