Summary

In this chapter, we started something a bit different. ROS is not all about programming; there are many additional things that make it a great tool for robotics.

You first discovered a 3D visualization tool used for ROS, named RViz. You will use this tool in most of your ROS applications. With RViz, you can visualize a robot model, which will be helpful when developing the model by yourself.

Then, you discovered what TFs are, and why they are so important in a ROS application. Here’s a quick recap:

• We need to keep track of each 3D coordinate frame over time, for the entire robotics application (one or several robots).
• Instead of computing the transformations ourselves, we use the ROS TF functionality, with the tf2 library. TFs are published on the /tf topic.
• TFs are organized into a structured tree that you can visualize.
• A TF defines how two frames are connected, and how they move relative to each other, over time.

To specify TFs for...