robot_pose_ekf with an external sensor

asked 2011-10-25 08:44:59 -0600

9031 ●58 ●128 ●143 https://www.linkedin.c...

I am trying to use the robot_pose_ekf package with my system, and am having trouble understanding what my tf tree should look like, and what frame the output of robot_pose_ekf is in. My robot is microcontroller based and is not running ROS on-board. Additionally it does not have any IMU information or visual sensing on-board. It reports its pose estimate (based on odometry) in an /odom frame at a fixed frequency. I have an external vision system tracking the robot as well. The transform from the /sensor_optical frame to the /odom frame is static and known. Every time the sensor transmits an estimate of the robot's position, I use this transform to transform the data into the /odom frame.

Thus, the /odom topic comes from the robot's odometry, and its header.frame_id is /odom, and its child_frame_id is /base_footprint. The /vo topic comes from the external vision system, and its header.frame_id is /odom, and its child_frame_id is /base_footprint. When I run the system the robot_pose_ekf package runs without any errors. If I plot the pose published on the /odom and /vo topic, they are exactly what I expect, but the pose published on /robot_pose_ekf/odom_combined topic is not what I expect. Setting the covariances of the /vo topic to be very high, the pose output of /robot_pose_ekf/odom_combined is then the same "shape" as that of /odom, but it must be in some odd coordinate system.

What am I doing wrong? What frame should this pose be expressed in? When I use tf2_visualization, I see that I have unconnected trees. robot_pose_ekf publishes a transform from /odom_combined -> /base_footprint, but that transform is unconnected from the rest of the tree. I definitely believe this is a problem, but I am unsure how to fix it. Finally, the pose published in /robot_pose_ekf/odom_combined says its frame_id is odom (but it doesn't actually seem to be).

Thanks!

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answered 2011-10-31 22:51:50 -0600

Martin Günther

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

Let's ignore the vision system for a moment, and focus on wheel odometry and robot_pose_ekf. Your TF tree should look like this (also see this ros-users thread):

map --> odom_combined --> base_footprint --> base_link

... where

map --> odom_combined is usually published by amcl (optional)
odom_combined --> base_footprint is published by robot_pose_ekf
base_footprint --> base_link is a fixed link in your URDF.

The reason for this peculiar choice of frames is that in TF, each frame can only have one parent. Intuitively, one would like to have multiple parents of base_footprint:

odom --> base_footprint for pure wheel odometry
odom_combined --> base_footprint for EKF estimation
map --> base_footprint for AMCL localization

Since this is not possible in TF, the frames are published as a chain (see above). The important part for your problem is that when using robot_pose_ekf, tf publishing from the wheel odometry has to be switched off. Instead, you should only publish nav_msgs/Odometry messages (using odom_combined as the header frame id), which form the input for robot_pose_ekf and can also be visualized in RViz.

In short:

use odom_combined instead of odom everywhere (or the other way around, but be consistent about it)
don't publish any TF messages, let robot_pose_ekf do that
publish nav_msgs/Odometry messages for the wheel odometry and the overhead camera on the /odom and /vo topics, in both cases specifying odom_combined as the header frame id and base_footprint as the child_frame_id.

I hope that helps; otherwise, could you post your TF tree, showing the unconnected frames?

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Thank you so much! That totally got me straightened out, and solved the issues that I was having. Given your explanation, I wonder why the geometry_msgs::PoseWithCovarianceStamped that is published by robot_pose_ekf has a hard-coded header.frame_id of "odom"?

jarvisschultz ( 2011-11-02 05:06:00 -0600 )edit

That's a good question, Jarvis. I think that is because there's a mismatch between REP-105 (which suggests "odom") and the way these frames are actually used on the PR2 and most other robots (which use "odom_combined"). See the mailing list thread linked in my answer.

Martin Günther ( 2011-11-03 21:56:25 -0600 )edit

2

This is awesome info and should be somewhere in the navigation stack documentation. It took me a long time to put all the pieces together the first time that we tried using move_base, but this is very clear.

mjcarroll ( 2012-01-26 02:19:34 -0600 )edit

how can i implement base_footprint --> base_link transformation?

Alireza ( 2012-01-26 04:37:31 -0600 )edit

@Güntherad @jarvisschultz ,thanks very much .But when i tried according to your answer ,i got a problem when rosrun move_base node .It says "odom" passed to lookuptransform argument target_frame does not exist" . how can i modify move_base to fix this tf problem,thanks very much .

jxl ( 2016-07-07 00:45:13 -0600 )edit

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answered 2016-08-04 17:48:56 -0600

krishna43
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I am having the same problem. I read your answer, but i am not able to totally understand how i can solve the problem. I am attaching my TF tree here. Can you please help me how i can resolve it? maybe post some code snippets.

Screenshot from 2016-08-04 15:46:39.png

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