rosbag play & tf extrapolation problems

asked 2013-11-12 01:54:24 -0600

Tambo
56 ●5 ●8 ●10

Hi everyone,

I wrote a program for collecting laser data from a bag (currently I'm using a bag from the gmapping node tutorial).

The bag is executed as usually: rosbag play bag

No problems so far, I can visualize everything in rviz. Problems are on the listener side. The callback, rather basic, is the following:

void callBack(const sensor_msgs::LaserScan::ConstPtr& msg)
{
     tf::TransformListener listener;
     tf::StampedTransform trans;
     try
     {
        ros::Time time=msg->header.stamp;
        listener.waitForTransform("base_laser", "odom", time, ros::Duration(1));
        listener.lookupTransform("base_laser", "odom", time, trans);
            //Do something
      }
      catch(tf::TransformException ex)
      {
             ROS_ERROR("%s",ex.what());
      }
}

In few words, it doesn't work, I always obtain:

Lookup would require extrapolation into the past

Lookup would require extrapolation into the future

I modified, by hand, the time variable value as follows:

ros::Time time=ros::Time(msg->header.stamp.sec+1);

Although it worked, to me is not a feasible or general solution.

Changing duration value didn't help either.

Am I doing something wrong? Maybe did I forget some parameter for ROS to set?

Thanks for your help,

Tambo

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answered 2013-11-14 22:52:20 -0600

Martin Günther

11816 ●82 ●159 ●198 https://www.dfki.de/en...

You should check for the return value of waitForTransform():

bool success = listener.waitForTransform("base_laser", "odom", time, ros::Duration(1));
if (success) {
    listener.lookupTransform("base_laser", "odom", time, trans);
}

What happens is that waitForTransform() fails, but you still call lookupTransform(), so that's where the exceptions come from.

The next step is figuring out why your lookups time out. It's normal if that happens for the first few laser scans, since your TF listener wasn't yet buffering TF messages before your node got started. But after a very short while, these errors should disappear.

One thing to check is that you set the queue size of your laser scan subscriber to a small value (like 1). Otherwise, you'll have the following problem:

The queue gets filled with laser scan messages from the "past" (i.e., the first second or so before the node was started).
Your callback works through the queue one message at a time; since waitForTransform() times out, this takes 1 second per message.
If you don't get a valid transform for the first 15 messages, all remaining messages will now fail because the TF buffer is only 15 seconds (or so) long.

This might also explain why adding 1 second "solves" the problem.

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answered 2013-11-12 21:02:51 -0600

timster

396 ●3 ●10 ●16

I think I have had a similar problem, my solution was to enable simulated time:

rosparam set use_sim_time true

Remember to set it for every ros session! And also remember to restart all your nodes after setting the parameter! The only thing now is to also publish the clock from the bag file:

rosbag play --clock your.bag

Does that help?

Best Tim

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