What is static transform publisher?

asked 2021-04-18 10:12:22 -0500

Chan gravatar image

I want to understand what is static transform publisher.

  1. What is the use of it?
  2. How does it work?
  3. Do we need a parent frame and child frame existing already?
  4. When should we use this?

I'm having RPLidar A1 with me and I thought of practicing it with mapping my room using hector slam. I did the best I could (like setting up the initial things, getting the scan data, recording it in a bag file and playing it). However, when I play the bag file, I'm having an error in the launch terminal - "Could not transform laser scan into base_frame". I really don't understand what it means. I used the rplidar_ros package to publish scan data and recorded it with rosbag record -a command.

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Comments

1

Everything you need to know about transforms, including static transforms, can be found on the offical wiki on tf.

Akhil Kurup gravatar image Akhil Kurup  ( 2021-04-18 10:45:37 -0500 )edit

The official wiki is pretty good, but there's not much information on "When should we use this?"

Of course, it is true that it-does-exactly-what-it-says-it-does, but mentioning a few use-cases/contexts would probably be useful to those new to static-transforms.

abhishek47 gravatar image abhishek47  ( 2022-02-05 05:05:30 -0500 )edit

@abhishek47 I agree that there might not be too much information about "When should we use this" but this part of the question is very open-ended and changes depending on each application. To be honest, the best way to figure out the need is to go through the tutorials and understand the why and the how.

Akhil Kurup gravatar image Akhil Kurup  ( 2022-02-05 10:33:15 -0500 )edit