Need help with basic navigation

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I am trying to wrap my head around the navigation stack, and how to run it.

My objective is to get my simple, differential-drive robot to navigate using the nav stack. I want to set a simple goal in rviz, and let my robot navigate to that position.

My robot is publishing tf frames: "base_laser" to "base_link", and "base_link" to "odom". It also sends odometry data (I use stepper motors), and laser scan data from a sonar sensor. I have been following the ROS navigation tutorials to get this far.

My robot currently shows this rqt graph shown below:

Nodes only

Nodes and topics

Right now, it seems that everything is in order, except that I get the tf error "Timed out waiting for transform from base_link to map to become available before running costmap . . . "

isn't the move_base node in charge of publishing the "base_link" to "map" transform?

Screen shot of tf tree:

<launch>
  <master auto="start"/>

  <!-- Run the map server -->
  <node name="map_server" pkg="map_server" type="map_server" args="$(find tf_test)/myTestMap.pgm 0.02"/>


  <!--- Run AMCL -->
  <include file="$(find amcl)/examples/amcl_diff.launch" />

  <node pkg="move_base" type="move_base" respawn="false" name="move_base" output="screen">
    <rosparam file="$(find tf_test)/costmap_common_params.yaml" command="load" ns="global_costmap" />
    <rosparam file="$(find tf_test)/costmap_common_params.yaml" command="load" ns="local_costmap" />
    <rosparam file="$(find tf_test)/local_costmap_params.yaml" command="load" />
    <rosparam file="$(find tf_test)/global_costmap_params.yaml" command="load" />
    <rosparam file="$(find tf_test)/base_local_planner_params.yaml" command="load" />
  </node>
</launch>


//[costmap_common_params.yaml]///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
obstacle_range: 2.5
raytrace_range: 3.0
footprint: [[-0.10, 0.10], [-0.10, -0.10], [0.10, -0.10], [0.10, 0.10]]
#robot_radius: ir_of_robot
inflation_radius: 0.15

observation_sources: laser_scan_sensor

laser_scan_sensor: {sensor_frame: base_laser, data_type: LaserScan, topic: scan, marking: true, clearing: true}

//[local_costmap_params.yaml]////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
local_costmap:
  global_frame: odom
  robot_base_frame: base_link
  update_frequency: 10.0
  publish_frequency: 10.0
  static_map: false
  rolling_window: true
  width: 2.0
  height: 2.0
  resolution: 0.02

//[global_costmap_params.yaml]///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
global_costmap:
  global_frame: /map
  robot_base_frame: base_link
  update_frequency: 0.5
  static_map: true

//[base_local_planner_params.yaml]///////////////////////////////////////////////////////
TrajectoryPlannerROS:
  max_vel_x: 0.1409946783
  min_vel_x: 0.0007049734
  max_vel_theta: 2.311388169
  min_in_place_vel_theta: 0.01155694

  acc_lim_theta: 2.311388169
  acc_lim_x: 0.1409946783
  acc_lim_y: 0

  holonomic_robot: true

amcl_diff.launch:

<launch>
<node pkg="amcl" type="amcl" name="amcl" output="screen">
  <!-- Publish scans from best pose at a max of 10 Hz -->
  <param name="odom_model_type" value="diff"/>
  <param name="odom_alpha5" value="0.1"/>
  <param name="transform_tolerance" value="0.2" />
  <param name="gui_publish_rate" value="10.0"/>
  <param name="laser_max_beams" value="30"/>
  <param name="min_particles" value="500"/>
  <param name="max_particles" value="5000"/>
  <param name="kld_err" value="0.05"/>
  <param name="kld_z" value="0.99"/>
  <param name="odom_alpha1" value="0.2"/>
  <param name="odom_alpha2" value="0.2"/>
  <!-- translation std dev, m -->
  <param name="odom_alpha3" value="0.8"/>
  <param name="odom_alpha4" value="0.2"/>
  <param name="laser_z_hit" value="0.5"/>
  <param name="laser_z_short" value="0.05"/>
  <param name="laser_z_max" value="0.05"/>
  <param name="laser_z_rand" value="0.5"/>
  <param name="laser_sigma_hit" value="0.2"/>
  <param name="laser_lambda_short" value="0.1"/>
  <param name="laser_lambda_short" value="0.1"/>
  <param name="laser_model_type" value="likelihood_field"/>
  <!-- <param name="laser_model_type" value ...