Creating transforms
The navigation stack needs to know the position of the sensors, wheels, and joints.
To do that, we use the Transform Frames (tf) software library. It manages a transform tree. You could do this with mathematics, but if you have a lot of frames to calculate, it will be a bit complicated and messy.
Thanks to tf, we can add more sensors and parts to the robot, and tf will handle all the relations for us.
If we put the laser 10 cm backwards and 20 cm above with reference to the origin of the base_link coordinates, we would need to add a new frame to the transformation tree with these offsets.
Once inserted and created, we could easily know the position of the laser with reference to the base_link value or the wheels. The only thing ...
Get Effective Robotics Programming with ROS - Third Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
