Discovering TFs with RViz
In Part 3 of this book, you will create a robot simulation with ROS 2. However, before you get started, you first need to understand what TransForms (TFs) are.
In ROS, a TF is the transformation between two frames in 3D space. TFs will be used to track the different coordinate frames of a ROS robot (or system with multiple robots) over time. They are used everywhere and will be the backbone of any robot you create.
To understand TFs, we will first look at an existing robot model. As we did back in Chapter 3, here, we will discover the concepts by experimenting, and you will build an intuition of how things work. During this phase, you will discover a few new ROS tools, including RViz, a 3D visualization package.
You will see for yourself how TFs work, how they are related to each other, and how to visualize the TF tree for any robot. By the end of this chapter, you will understand what TFs are, what problems they solve, and how they are used in a...
