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I found the problem. Basically, a chain reaction caused by a buffer overflow.
I have a base controller that runs on an STM32 microcontroller that connects via USB to a Raspberry Pi running ros_serial. The microcontroller was publishing on /odom but there was a buffer error and the result was random garbage was being sent over the serial USB connection in addition to correct odometry. ros_serial interpreted this random gibberish as pointer to a standard message type "string" that contained just an ASCII "blank space" character being published on the /imu topic. This the just random luck.
I increased the size of a statically allocated buffer in the microcontroller and then robot-localization (running on the Pi3) stops writing errors messages.
So, what did I learn? ROS nodes are more tightly coupled than I would think. Buffer overflow on microcontroller causes unrelated node on another computer to fail. We need to better validate all incoming data to better contain errors
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