ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

The 2D pose estimate

The 2D pose estimate (P shortcut) allows the user to initialize the localization system used by the navigation stack by setting the pose of the robot in the world.

The navigation stack waits for the new pose of a new topic with the name initialpose. This topic is sent using the rviz windows where we previously changed the name of the topic.

You can see in the following screenshot how you can use initialpose. Click on the 2D Pose Estimate button, and click on the map to indicate the initial position of your robot. If you don't do this at the beginning, the robot will start the auto-localization process and try to set an initial pose:

• Topic: initialpose
• Type: geometry_msgs/PoseWithCovarianceStamped