I had been away from ROS world for a while now, but recently had to use ROS for work. I have not worked with mobile robots before so the terminology is new to me. In this post, I want to document things I learned about ROS. Currently, it is focused on mobile robots.

ROS Transformations for Mobile Robots

In a nutshell,

odom to base_link is the position of the robot in the inertial odometric frame, as reported by some odometric sensor (like wheel encoders)

map to odom is a correction introduced by localization or SLAM packages, to account for odometric errors.

map to base_link is therefore the corrected pose of the robot in the inertial world frame.

These are dynamic transforms, and different components of the navigation stack are responsible for publishing them. copied from 1 also checkout 2

Gazebo on VMWare

Gazebo can sometimes fault when using VMware + Ubuntu with hardware acceleration. It is unclear why this is happening but the root cause seems to be at VMware’s graphics stack. You can get around this error by setting the environment variable SVGA_VGPU10=0. This tells gazebo to fallback to OpenGL 2.x 3.

export SVGA_VGPU10=0

  1. https://answers.ros.org/question/10658/transform-base_link-to-base_lasermapodom/?answer=15727#post-id-15727 ↩

  2. https://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0105.html ↩

  3. https://docs.mesa3d.org/vmware-guest.html ↩