I am working on building the map. I have selected the correct topics after creating my launch file and demonstrating that it actually maps. I am however not seeing that the laser scans are showing up even though I changed the Reliability Policy to best effort.
In terminal 1 I am running cartographer
In terminal 2 I have rviz running
In terminal 3 I have the teleop keyboard node running
I also noticed gazebo is not starting with the teleop node. Is there another node I need to bring up for gazebo to start and for me to be able to control the robot through teleop?
Here is what rviz looks like in terms of the topics (I noticed that some of the transforms don’t exist in the TF topic):
Gazebo is the program that runs the simulated robot and its world. It’s the top right window.
You don’t need to start Gazebo at any point in the course, since it is already running. And you are right, running a teleoperation node will not start Gazebo, they have nothing to do with each other. If you can see the robot (or the simulated world), then Gazebo is running. You can use the teleop node at any point to move the robot, provided the node is publishing in the correct Twist topic (/cmd_vel).
I think you might be confusing Gazebo with RViz, which is a separate program that visualizes ROS data (which is what you shared in your screenshot).
The most important part of your question is
Could you actually show that in RViz? You can just make the screenshot wider. Also, please show the output of the terminal where you are running the cartographer.
