Navigation issue

[PeterEmrys]

Robot Model

Turtlebot4 Standard

ROS distro

Humble

Networking Configuration

I do not know

OS

Ubuntu 20.04

Built from source or installed?

Installed

Package version

I don't know

Type of issue

Navigation (SLAM, Nav2 etc.)

Expected behaviour

Mapping and navigation in the mapped space

Actual behaviour

• Navigation succeeds only about 1 out of 10 times, and even those attempts were inconsistent.
• The robot rotates in place continuously as if trying to re-localize, and changing the goal has no effect.
• In some attempts the robot shows sudden or unstable movements and has collided with nearby objects.
• Over time, performance deteriorated until navigation stopped working entirely.

Error messages

Additional RViz Issue:
Even though echoing /tb4/map shows that the topic is being published and subscribed to, RViz reports that the Fixed Frame [map] is not available. The map display shows “No map received”, while topics like /scan and /base_link appear normally.

Attempted Fixes:
• Restarting the system using systemctl restart turtlebot4 helped briefly at the beginning, but later had no effect.
• Fully re-setup the robot and switched from Simple Discovery to Discovery Server. This resolved communication issues, but navigation remained broken.
• Fixed all timestamp-related AMCL and Nav2 errors:
– AMCL: “Message Filter dropping message: frame ‘rplidar_link’ … timestamp earlier than transform cache.”
– Nav2: “Lookup would require extrapolation into the past.”
After correcting timing parameters, the warnings disappeared, but navigation behavior did not improve.

Even after solving timing and startup issues, the robot continues rotating in place, does not follow the global path, and fails every navigation attempt.

Currently we can't even reach the navigation state as the mapping itself is failing.

To Reproduce

Testing Procedure:
• Localization launch:
ros2 launch turtlebot4_navigation localization.launch.py map:=lab_map.yaml namespace:=/tb4
• Nav2 launch:
ros2 launch turtlebot4_navigation nav2.launch.py namespace:=/tb4
• RViz launch:
ros2 launch turtlebot_viz view_robot.launch.py namespace:=/tb4

Other notes

create3Logs.txt
runningslam.txt
sudojournalctl.txt

[smatarCPR]

Hello @PeterEmrys
Thank you for reaching out on the Turtlebot 4 Github page. I am very sorry to hear that your unit is not meeting expectations. In terms of the issue encountered I have the following questions/recommendations:

• Currently what sort of networking configuration is being used for the Turtlebot 4? Are you running a discovery server or using simple discovery communication between the offboard computer and Turtlebot.
• Are you running the Navigation stack locally on the Turtlebot 4 or on the offboard computer?
• Are there other Turtlebots or other ROS enabled devices sharing the same network you are using?
• With regards to the data output shared it seems some of the text was corrupted or malformatted and we are unable to read the data, would it be possible to regenerate these logs?
• Is the option to upgrade to ROS 2 Jazzy available to you?

Let me know the results of these checks. Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Best Regards,
Saif