Range sensor layer can't transform from map to /ultrasound. However, detected obstacles are correctly placed in the map

edit

Hi all,

I'm having some issues adding ultrasonic sensors to my costmap. My robot was set up using the move_base setup guide, and uses a single Hokuyo lidar for SLAM with hector_mapping. It uses three costmaps: local_costmap_params.yaml, global_costmap_params.yaml and costmap_common_params.yaml. I am using ROS indigo.

To help get the ultrasonic data into the costmap(s) I made a simplified URDF model (instead of manually adding static transform publishers to launch files, as I did with the laser scanner). I've got data from a SRF05 into ROS and displaying as a cone from the front of my model in RVIZ, and after a bit of playing with the costmaps I've managed to get ultrasonic range data to register as inflated obstacles in the local costmap.

The problem is that when I add the sonar sensor to the costmap, I no longer have any lidar data in the costmap. Before I added the range_layer to the params.yaml file I could see a global and local costmap in rviz. Now that the sonar settings are in there too I only see the ultrasonic range costmap stuff inside the local costmap, and the global costmap is empty. I am getting errors out of the move_base terminal which read:

[ERROR] [1486152698.562581761]: Range sensor layer can't transform from map to /ultrasound at 1486152698.395551

However there must be at least an intermittent transformation between map and /ultrasound because I can see the obstacles being added to the costmap in RVIZ, as you can see here. For comparison, this is what I get when I remove the "sonar_layer:" section and the "plugins:" section from costmap_common_params.yaml.

I'm not too sure what I'm doing in general with setting all this up (figuring it all out as I go along), so any advice or pointers from anyone would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Firstly, forgot to upload my tf frame tree. I can see that the transform between map and laser is only 10Hz, but as it's provided by my SLAM module whose input is a LIDAR with a max scanning rate of 10Hz I don't see how I can speed it up.

Also, to try and solve Range sensor layer can't transform from map to /ultrasound I ran: rosrun tf tf_monitor map ultrasound which gave me the following:

RESULTS: for map to ultrasound
Chain is: ultrasound -> base_link -> laser -> map
Net delay     avg = 0.119112: max = 0.168371

Frames:
Frame: base_link published by unknown_publisher Average Delay: -0.0398328 Max Delay: 0
Frame: laser published by unknown_publisher Average Delay: 0.0689363 Max Delay: 0.069513
Frame: map published by unknown_publisher Average Delay: -0.0398488 Max Delay: 0
Frame: ultrasound published by unknown_publisher Average Delay: -0.499823 Max Delay: 0

All Broadcasters:
Node: unknown_publisher 144.92 Hz, Average Delay: -0.183418 Max Delay: 0.0692722

Is anyone able to help me make sense of this? At the moment, as far as I can tell I have two problems ... (more)