This is a debug tool to monitor ROS tf topic. geometry2 is an ausome library to handle geometric transformations with time stamp, and tf and tf2 is a core library of geometry2.

When utilizing tf/tf2, the following points should be noted.

1. tf tree can have only one root frame.
2. Too old timestamp or timestamp in the future sometimes causes a defect of your robot system.

This ROS package provides a means of checking to see if any of the above problems are occurring.

roslaunch rocky_tf_monitor demo.launch
rosrun rocky_tf_monitor rocky_tf_monitor

In this demo, invalid /tf topic is demonstrated. Although node /odom_pub publish base_footprint coordinate frame in odom coordinate frame, bug_node also publish base_footprint coordinate frame in map coordinate frame. rqt_tf_tree cannot deal with these kind of problem. By rocky_tf_monitor we can confirm base_footprint has two parent frame, which is indicated by red line.

cd /path/to/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/rkoyama1623/rocky_tf_monitor.git
rosdep install --from-path rocky_tf_monitor -iry
cd rocky_tf_monitor
catkin build --this

rosrun rocky_tf_monitor rocky_tf_monitor

MIT