Navigate using hector_slam

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Hello,

Using my custom robot base, I can successfully perform autonomous navigation using either [amcl/map_server/move_base] or [gmapping/move_base]. However, I really would like to use hector_mapping for SLAM, as it seems to perform much better (less CPU, better localization). I tried two approaches, but none led to success:

OPTION 1: Use hector_mapping/move_base

This fails with the follwing error message thrown by move_base:

[ERROR] [1384155009.792804637]: Extrapolation Error: Lookup would require extrapolation into the future.  Requested time 1384155009.754343262 but the latest data is at time 1384155009.733661973, when looking up transform from frame [odom] to frame [map]

Looking at the output of rosrun tf tf_monitor, I can see the following differences between the published tf's:

hector_mapping providing /map -> /odom transform:

rosrun tf tf_monitor
Frame: odom published by /hector_mapping Average Delay: 0.0486663 Max Delay: 0.0770144

amcl providing /map -> /odom transform:

rosrun tf tf_monitor
Frame: odom published by /amcl Average Delay: -0.0532177 Max Delay: 0

This completely makes sense, as the amcl documentation states here:

The published transforms are future dated.

This explains why move_base throws the extrapolation error. The question is: How to fix it? Of course, I could add 0.1s to the tf time stamp generated by hector_mapping in the source, but then I won't get future package updates, which is not ideal. Any better suggestions how to make hector_mapping compatible with move_base?

Option 2: Use hecor_navigation package

Unfortunately, there is no documentation available for this package. As hecor_navigation only available from source, I downloaded it from here into my rosbuild workspace (package is not catkinized) and ran rosmake to compile it. This produced the following error:

[rospack] Error: package/stack 'hector_elevation_visualization' depends on non-existent package 'common_rosdeps' and rosdep claims that it is not a system dependency. Check the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH or try calling 'rosdep update'

@Stefan: Is hecor_navigation still being maintained, or is there a successor package that is compatible with Groovy or Hydro?

Thanks, Heiko