Robot model moves in RViz and map builds even without actual hardware movement

[btajne]

Hello Chinedu,

First of all, thank you for this amazing project.

We recently encountered an issue while running the following commands in separate terminals:

1. ros2 launch lidarbot_bringup lidarbot_bringup_launch.py
2. ros2 launch lidarbot_slam online_async_launch.py slam_params_file:=src/lidarbot_slam/config/mapper_params_online_async.yaml use_sim_time:=false
3. rviz2 -d src/lidarbot_slam/rviz/lidarbot_slam.rviz

RViz starts successfully, and the robot model is visualized. However, even when the physical robot is not moving or being controlled, the robot model in RViz starts drifting and rotating. This unintended motion also causes the map to build inaccurately, as if the robot is moving and rotating in the environment.

We suspect this might be due to a misconfiguration in TFs or EKF parameters.

Could you please help us understand:

Why this might be happening?

If there's any specific parameter or sensor setup we should double-check (e.g., /odom, imu, robot_localization, etc.)?

Thank you again for your work on this project. Looking forward to your insights.

[TheNoobInventor]

Hell @btajne, thank you for the kind words. I am not close to the robot now, I'll get back to you in a few days after testing things out on my end to see if I can replicate what you are experiencing.

But in the meantime, it does sound like an odometry issue. To establish a baseline, are you using the same motors and imu as the ones on lidarbot?

[btajne]

Hello Chinedu,

Thanks for the reply.

I was encountering this issue earlier, but after deleting the workspaces on both my development machine and the Raspberry Pi bot, and then rebuilding them from scratch, everything started working smoothly. The model in RViz now remains stationary as expected.

Also, to answer your question—yes, I am using the same motors and IMU as those on the LidarBot.

[TheNoobInventor]

I am happy to hear that everything is working smoothly now and I wish you all the best with your project