$\color{white}\colorbox{FE9227}{Reaching a significant milestone and deepening expertise!}$
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The next step in simulating our robot is to create our robot tf2 tree. Having a tight and accurate tf2 tree is essential for a working robot simulation.
The first thing to note when starting to build your robot tf2 tree is aligning your simulation frame with your robot frame. Within rviz, the x-axis is shown in red, the y-axis is green, and the z-axis is blue. Your robot should be aligned such that the x-axis points to the front of the robot, the y-axis spans the width of the robot, and the z-axis aligns with the height of the robot.
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⚠️ These conventions are very important! These will align your odometry properly to the map frame, which will be important when doing navigation and SLAM.
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To launch an RVIZ window for visualizing, you must first lauch the GUI and then add the appropriate visualization tab and chose your robot xacro.
Launch an RVIZ window using the following command:
rviz2
Once your RVIZ GUI is opened, it should look like this
INSERT PICTUER
An especially useful tool when creating robots is using xacro:macros. This will create a cleaner and shorter file to describe your robot because you can use the same macro, but mirrored, for wheels on opposite sides of the robot. See the XACRO ****for more information.
Let’s start by creating the “master” XACRO, this will be the file that will include all the external XACRO files used to describe the joints, sensors, and ros2_control.