The navigation stack requires odometry data from the robot. The odometry is the displacement vector relative to a fixed inertial frame or world frame. Here, it is the displacement vector between the base_link and a fixed point in the odom frame. The message type used by the navigation stack is nav_msgs/Odometry. The following command shows its detailed structure which is shown in the following screenshot:
$ rosmsg show nav_msgs/Odometry
In the preceding screenshot, we can see that the pose has two structures that represent the position in Euler coordinates and the orientation of the robot using a quaternion. ...