Hi!

For planning without running a full localization, I found 
fake_localization quite useful. I fixed some problems and added a new 
functionality, which could be integrated back if others agree that it's 
useful. The full changed file and a patch against trunk is attached. 
There are some things (hacks?) that I did not fully understand, so I 
left most of fake_localization.cpp untouched ;)

The things I changed are:
 * frames_ids are now config options (not every robot has a 
base_footprint, and shouldn't this be base_link instead?)
 * added a callback to geometry_msgs::PoseWithCovarianceStamped 
("initialpose"), so you can (re)set the localized pose in RViz.

That works nice so far, and I wanted to get this one step further, as a 
really simple fake localization e.g. to interact directly with planning 
algorithms by just using RViz (setting start and goal pose). For this, I 
would want it to run even when there are no odometry messages. A user 
could then set the robot pose with the "initialpose" topic and the 
localization would put the robot there by publishing the corresponding 
TFs as long as no odometry arrives. Right now everything is triggered by 
odometry, and I don't fully understand the subscriptions there. There is 
one connected to a tf filter with no topic (empty string), and another 
one that only adds its message to the filter... shouldn't one 
subscription be sufficient?

Best regards,
Armin

-- 
Armin Hornung                              Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~hornunga   Dept. of Computer Science
HornungA@informatik.uni-freiburg.de        Humanoid Robots Lab
Tel.: +49 (0)761-203-8010                  Georges-Köhler-Allee 79
Fax : +49 (0)761-203-8007                  D-79110 Freiburg, Germany