Problems with tf transform, running multiple machines

edit

I have one host that calculates the odometry for our robot and publish this information to another machine that serves as the client. At the client, I have a vision system that runs an object detection. When I retrieve a position for a detected object, I need to look up where the robot position was when the picture was taken. However, I receive an error telling me that the time for the lookup request requires extrapolation back in time.

I have installed and configured the two machines so that the master is running the roscore and the client connect to this over IP. Moreover, I also installed chrony on both machines and configured it so that the client is using the master machine as the clock reference, and the master uses a public server. I've also checked the tf transformations being published on the client side, and I'm able to see the tf frames of interest "odom" and "base_footprint"

I do not see this error when I simulate the environment the robot in gazebo. Then I'm able to do the same tf lookup in past.

The code I'm using to do the lookupTransform (im using 1second duration just as an example here, but that would be replaced by the timestamp when the picture was taken):

  t_now = ros::Time::now();
  t_past = t_now -  ros::Duration(1.0);
  try
  {
    listener.waitForTransform( "odom", "base_footprint", t_now, ros::Duration(5) );
    listener.lookupTransform( "odom", "base_footprint", t_now, tf_odom_now);

    listener.waitForTransform( "odom", "base_footprint", t_past, ros::Duration(5) );
    listener.lookupTransform( "odom", "base_footprint", t_past, tf_odom_past);

    initialDistanceTraveled = sqrt(pow(tf_odom_now.getOrigin().x()-tf_odom_past.getOrigin().x(),2)+pow(tf_odom_now.getOrigin().y()-tf_odom_past.getOrigin().y(),2));
    std::cout << "Initial distance traveled: " << initialDistanceTraveled << std::endl;
  }
  catch (tf::TransformException &ex)
  {
      ROS_ERROR("%s",ex.what());
      //return;
  }

Im running out of ideas of what the problem could be. Anyone else having some ideas? It seems that on the client side the tf history is not present, just the current one....

Error from console:

[ERROR] [1567693204.971989003]: Lookup would require extrapolation into the past. Requested time 1567693199.970102901 but the earliest data is at time 1567693199.996886492, when looking up transform from frame [base_footprint] to frame [odom]

Edit: The problem was that I created the listener object inside one of my callback functions. That's why I couldn't extract tf transformation back in time. By changing the creation of the listener to be at the start of my program and make it a global variable, I could get these history transformations of robot position!