Odometry (/odom) Not Updating — Causes Waypoint Follower to Send FORWARD Indefinitely

[VinaySampath14]

📌 Issue Title

Odometry (/odom) Not Updating — Causes Waypoint Follower to Send FORWARD Indefinitely

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📝 Description

I’m working on a ROS 2-based waypoint-following robot. I have two nodes:

• waypoint_follower_node → publishes Twist to /cmd_vel based on waypoints
• serial_motor_controller → subscribes to /cmd_vel and sends motor commands like "FORWARD", "STOP" to Arduino

However, the robot keeps moving forward indefinitely and never switches direction or completes the waypoint sequence.

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🔍 Observations

✅ Serial Controller Working

• The serial_motor_controller logs show continuous "FORWARD" commands being sent:

  [INFO] Command sent: FORWARD
  [INFO] Command sent: FORWARD
  ...
  

❌ Odometry Not Updating

• When I echoed /odom, I noticed the position is repeating and not changing:

  position:
    x: 110.93110205269798
    y: 67.64417217594637
    z: 0.0

• This value remains constant across multiple time samples, which indicates that odometry is not being updated.

🔄 Expected Behavior

• The waypoint follower computes the distance to the goal using:

  distance = sqrt((goal_x - x)**2 + (goal_y - y)**2)

• Since x and y are stuck, distance never goes below threshold → robot keeps sending FORWARD.

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🧪 What I Tried

• Verified /odom is being published → ✅ yes, but values are constant
• Changed distance threshold → no effect
• Added debug logs to print position and distance → confirms pose is not changing
• Echoed /odom → shows no position updates

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🤔 Likely Root Cause

• The component responsible for publishing /odom (possibly Arduino or another odometry source) is not updating pose data.
• This breaks waypoint logic that depends on updated pose to track progress.

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✅ Request

• Please help verify or fix the odometry update mechanism.
• If this is a hardware/sensor integration issue, suggestions for simulation or fallback approaches (like distance-based logic or mock odometry) would be appreciated.

odom.txt