message_tf_frame_transformer

The message_tf_frame_transformer package provides a ROS / ROS 2 node(let) to transform ROS messages of arbitrary type to a different coordinate frame. This can be helpful if you cannot or do not want to modify the source code of other ROS nodes that require your data to be valid in a specific coordinate frame. Simply launch the message_tf_frame_transformer node and transform arbitrary ROS message to a target coordinate frame.

• Installation
  • docker-ros
• Usage
• Supported Message Types
• Nodes/Nodelets
• Acknowledgements

Installation

The message_tf_frame_transformer package is released as an official ROS / ROS 2 package and can easily be installed via a package manager.

sudo apt install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-message-tf-frame-transformer

If you would like to install message_tf_frame_transformer from source, simply clone this repository into your ROS workspace. All dependencies that are listed in the ROS package.xml can be installed using rosdep.

# message_tf_frame_transformer$
rosdep install -r --ignore-src --from-paths .

# ROS 2
# workspace$
colcon build --packages-up-to message_tf_frame_transformer --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

# ROS
# workspace$
catkin build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release message_tf_frame_transformer

docker-ros

message_tf_frame_transformer is also available as a Docker image, containerized through docker-ros.

# ROS
docker run --rm ghcr.io/ika-rwth-aachen/message_tf_frame_transformer:ros

# ROS 2
docker run --rm ghcr.io/ika-rwth-aachen/message_tf_frame_transformer:ros2

Usage

In order to transform messages on topic $INPUT_TOPIC to frame $TARGET_FRAME_ID and publish them to topic $OUTPUT_TOPIC, the message_tf_frame_transformer node can be started with the following topic remappings and parameter setting. Only the target_frame_id parameter is required. The source_frame_id parameter is only required for non-stamped messages without an std_msgs/Header. The topics default to ~/input and ~/transformed in the node’s private namespace.

# ROS 2
ros2 run message_tf_frame_transformer message_tf_frame_transformer --ros-args \
  -r \~/input:=$INPUT_TOPIC \
  -r \~/transformed:=$OUTPUT_TOPIC \
  -p source_frame_id:=$SOURCE_FRAME_ID \
  -p target_frame_id:=$TARGET_FRAME_ID

# ROS
rosrun message_tf_frame_transformer message_tf_frame_transformer \
  ~input:=$INPUT_TOPIC \
  ~transformed:=$OUTPUT_TOPIC \
  _source_frame_id:=$SOURCE_FRAME_ID \
  _target_frame_id:=$TARGET_FRAME_ID

The provided launch file enables you to directly launch a tf2_ros/static_transform_publisher alongside the message_tf_frame_transformer node. This way you can transform a topic to a new coordinate frame with a single command.

```bash

ROS 2

ros2 launch message_tf_frame_transformer message_tf_frame_transformer.launch.ros2.xml
input_topic:=$INPUT_TOPIC
output_topic:=$OUTPUT_TOPIC
source_frame_id:=$SOURCE_FRAME_ID
target_frame_id:=$TARGET_FRAME_ID
x:=$X
y:=$Y
z:=$Z
roll:=$ROLL
pitch:=$PITCH
yaw:=$YAW

ROS

roslaunch message_tf_frame_transformer message_tf_frame_transformer.launch
input_topic:=$INPUT_TOPIC
output_topic:=$OUTPUT_TOPIC
source_frame_id:=$SOURCE_FRAME_ID
target_frame_id:=$TARGET_FRAME_ID \

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