gmapping: base_link to odom missing

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I assumed that there is no odometry transform because the base_link is the single root in a fully connected frame tree. So, I need the name of the frames to be odom, base_link and laser? How do I define other names then?

If there is an odometry message published, you have odometry. The message and tf are usually redundant. The frame names are odom and base_link by convention. You can use whatever you want. gmapping will only look for two frames to determine the odom tf. Check gmapping docs what the params are.

Got it to work thanks to your direction but it's not doing anything after "Registering first scan.". That's for another topic I guess.

Maybe, just to check: Make sure that you are actually getting odom tf to gmappings (besides having a sender also having data).

What I did was create a fake odom tf using "rosrun tf static_transform_publisher 0 0 0 0 0 0 odom base_link 100", and run gmapping using the correct parameters. When I display the map on rviz, the map from the first laser scan is displayed but gmapping is stuck at "Registering first scan".

And when I rotate the robot, nothing, still "Registering first scan" and no map update. I'm now going to write a node to read the odometry topic I mentioned in my original post and broadcast a TF using that to see how it goes.

That explains everything. gmapping will only integrate more scans if the robot moves a certain amount. As the static publisher never "moves" the robot, you only get the first update. Implementing real odom should fix that.

By move, do you mean translation, rotation or both? I wrote a new node which: subscribes to odometry data, publish it and broadcast a tf with the same child. Still, when the robot rotates,the map doesn't update.