I'm basically doing the same thing as Jeff here, I have a node publishing
the jointState's messages on /joint_state topic. What I understood from
http://www.ros.org/wiki/robot_state_publisher/Tutorials/Using%20the%20robot%20state%20publisher%20on%20your%20own%20robot
is that the robot_state_publisher would subscribe to the /joint_state topic
and together with the urdf model from the parameter server it would send the
appropriate poses of each link to the tf listener (rviz for that matter).

I can't get rid of the "No transform from /whatever /odom" message. The only
transform available is the one I specifically send from the /odom to the
root node of my urdf model.

The launch file content follows in case it were of any help, any further
information necessary let me know. The urdf model is correctly parsed,
flatten out and displayed collapsed on rviz.

Pol Monsó

http://ros-users.122217.n3.nabble.com/file/n1911159/wam.launch wam.launch 
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