[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] Request for Comments: static_transform_mux

[Martin Pecka]

Hello ROS (1) developers. Recently, I was facing some issues due to the fact that I had more than one `/tf_static` publisher in my system. I think that's not completely unusual, since I've seen several people trying to do the same.

The problem is the following: the `/tf_static` topic should have all publishers latched, which is good for latecomers, but not sufficient - all latecomers will only get the transforms from the last publisher that published to `/tf_static`. What I (and [more people](https://github.com/ros/geometry2/issues/181)) would expect is that latecomers get all the static transforms from all publishers. That is not accomplishable through latching.

I tackled the problem by creating the [static_transform_mux](https://github.com/tradr-project/static_transform_mux) node that sits there all the time, remembers everything it saw on `/tf_static`, and tries to always be the last publisher on the topic publishing all the transforms it saw.

What do you think about this approach? It's still a bit hacky (relying on early startup of this node), but otherwise? Do you think it's worth trying to publish it as an official ROS package? Or should I instead send a PR to `tf2_ros`?

Thank you very much for your opinions!





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