I am using ROS Melodic and I'm trying to set up the navigation stack for multirobot exploration. I have mapped, using a single robot, a portion of the environment using gmapping and saved the map as mymap.yaml. Now what I'm trying to do is to deploy more than one robot on the same map, thus using a shared map but different AMCL and move_base nodes.

The issue I'm encountering is that, even just running a single robot I get this message on the log (sender: robot_1/move_base):

[ WARN] [1573556920.087568294, 15.021000000]: Timed out waiting for transform from base_link to map to become available before running costmap, tf error: canTransform: source_frame base_link does not exist.. canTransform returned after 0.1 timeout was 0.1.

This happens only if I run the move_base node, otherwise it doesn't show.
From some other questions regarding this same matter I've learned that it might be caused by the /scan topic not being published, which in my case is robot_N/scan, but I've checked it through Rviz and data is showing flawlessly.
This same error also happened with base_footprint instead of base_link, and the solution I found was to add this parameter, relative to the move_base's local and global costmaps:

<param name="robot_base_frame" value="$(arg robot_name)/base_footprint" />

I don't include it in the .yaml file because I wouldn't be able to insert the namespace robot_name unless I hardcode it (but that wouldn't work for all the different robots) and place a remap tag, whose purpose is, in this case, equivalent.

---

Moreover, I also noticed that doing rostopic list doesn't show all the topics that are called by movebase, for instance the global and local planner/costmaps. Only `movebase_simple/goal` is shown, in the correct namespace.

My files (pastebin)

Parameters:

• local costmap: https://pastebin.com/ia5gEGpS
• global costmap: https://pastebin.com/0g8EhH8w
• costmap common params (loaded in the "global" and "local" ns): https://pastebin.com/CcVTZxnK
• dwa planner: https://pastebin.com/Y8DgZNTQ
• move_base: https://pastebin.com/9d8c2Uwi

Launch files

• one_robot.launch: https://pastebin.com/jhSvEbHR
• multirobot.launch: https://pastebin.com/zDz27Rnq

Ros debugging tools (imgur)

• rqt_graph: https://imgur.com/a/FHJymyV
• rqttftree: https://imgur.com/a/5pAAu70

<param name="$(arg robot_name)/move_base/global_costmap/robot_base_frame" value="$(arg robot_name)/base_footprint" />