How to incorporate moveable sensor (Lidar) into navigation stack

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Related to the part of the rotating lidar, I created an example that shows how to detect the closest obstacle to the whole system at any position of the rotation. The trick is to reference the obstacle to the base_link and use the tf to transform from the laser reference frame to the base_linkreference frame.

I have done this in Python, using tf2_ros and tf2_geometry_msgs.

1st. Initialize the tf buffer and listener somewhere in your init function

buffer = tf2_ros.Buffer(rospy.Duration(1200.0)) 
tf_listener = tf2_ros.TransformListener(self.tf_buffer)

2nd. Do the actual transformation

transform = buffer.lookup_transform(target_frame, #destination frame
                                   pose_stamped_to_transform.header.frame_id, #source frame
                                   rospy.Time(0), #get the tf at first available time
                                   rospy.Duration(1.0)) #wait for 1 second

pose_transformed = tf2_geometry_msgs.do_transform_pose(pose_stamped, transform)

You can watch the video here that shows a full example and how it looks in Rviz.

Cheers