Transform from base_link to odom failed

Question

If someone can shoot some wisdom my way I would be much obliged.

I have the gyro installed, showing up on dashboard, all green. When I am driving around performing the mapping, I get the error in terminal from gmapping.

Transform from base_link to odom failed

The below is what I get from dashboard.

Node: /slam_gmapping Time: 1326381589.218725027 Severity: Error Location: /tmp/buildd/ros-electric-slam-gmapping-1.2.4/debian/ros-electric-slam-gmapping/opt/ros/electric/stacks/slam_gmapping/gmapping/src/slam_gmapping.cpp:laserCallback:496 Published Topics: /rosout, /tf, /slam_gmapping/entropy, /map, /map_metadata

Thanks.

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Originally posted by osuairt on ROS Answers with karma: 69 on 2012-01-12

Post score: 0

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Original comments

Comment by ahendrix on 2012-02-28:
Is this a turtlebot or a turtlebot clone? What is the system load while running gmapping? Does this happen immediately, or only after gmapping has been running for a while?

Comment by osuairt on 2012-02-29:
It is a turtlebot clone. It doesn't happen immediately, say if I spent 15mins driving around a space mapping, I would get the error 4 or 5 times. It can then be seen that the position of the turtlebot jumps in Rviz. I suspect that the inconsistent odom values then play havoc on closing the loop.

Comment by osuairt on 2012-02-29:
From what it seems it looks like a problem with the tf. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/36264864/second.bag

Comment by ahendrix on 2012-02-29:
What are the specs on your computer? What is the system load (uptime, top) while getting this error?

Answer 1

On a system that is slightly underpowered, you may see this error occasionally. As long as it's happening infrequently, perhaps only once every few minutes, you should be able to ignore it.

Alternatively, you could capture tf and scan data as a bag file and run gmapping offline, when other nodes aren't competing with it for CPU and memory. See: http://ros.org/wiki/slam_gmapping(2f)Tutorials(2f)MappingFromLoggedData.html

If you're seeing this more than once per second, it means that there's something wrong with your odometry source.

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Originally posted by ahendrix with karma: 47576 on 2012-02-29

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2

Answer 2

Do you have an odometry source running? On a normal turtlebot, this is part of the minimal.launch file.

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Originally posted by ahendrix with karma: 47576 on 2012-01-12

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2

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Original comments

Comment by osuairt on 2012-01-12:
I am running "roslaunch turtlebot_bringup minimal.launch" like normal. Other mention of this error has had to do with the gyro, but it is installed and working.

Comment by osuairt on 2012-02-28:
This is still a persistent problem.

Comment by osuairt on 2012-02-29:
From what it seems it looks like a problem with the tf. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/36264864/second.bag