Creating an empty environment?

[haudren]

Is it possible to create an empty environment? This would be useful for my testing, but so far it seems like it's impossible:

• Environment needs to be initialized
• Initializing it with an empty scene graph crashes
• When using KDL parser it crashes if the scene graph does not have at least a joint

What's the reasonìng behind those limitations? Is there a way to create an empty environment?

[Levi-Armstrong]

What's the reasonìng behind those limitations? Is there a way to create an empty environment?

I believe it just because we have not had a use case for this. The scene graph fully supports this but I do believe the environment expect to have a non empty scene graph. You may try just adding a single link to the scene graph and then initialize it and see if that works.

Though I am not against adding the capability to do this so if you want to add the ability to do this I would be happy to review the PR and work with you to get this integrated in. I recommend starting with my open PR which cleans up a lot in tesseract_environment and adds several unit tests. I believe it would be a matter of implementing the following constructor and then addressing any issues.

  template <typename S>
  bool init(const std::string& name)