Problem launching Gmapping with Kinect on Turtlebot

edit

I believe your problem is caused by launching roslaunch turtlebot_navigation gmapping_demo.launch on your workstation, when it should be launched on the Turtlebot laptop instead.

The reason being that gmapping_demo.launch not only starts the gmapping node, but also starts the freenect node for the kinect sensor, and since the kinect sensor is not connected to your workstation the node won't be able to recieve any data from the sensor. If there isn't any data from the sensor then gmapping won't publish any transform information for the map frames.

Try launching these on the turtlebot:

roslaunch turtlebot_bringup minimal.launch

roslaunch turtlebot_navigation gmapping_demo.launch

Then this on the workstation:

roslaunch turtlebot_rviz_launchers view_navigation.launch

in the event that everything works, but the RobotModel still has a red error sign, try closing and reopening RVIZ. Sometimes it doesn't properly reload the RobotModel if you launch it before the model is actually being published (at least for me).

If you still have issues maybe post the terminal outputs from these commands. The Turtlebot launch files should work without any problems, so it must be either which machine you are launching them from, or something to do with your network setup.