The 2D pose estimate allows the user to initialize the localization system of the navigation stack by setting the pose of the robot in the world. The navigation stack waits on the topic with the name /initialpose for the first pose, which can be sent by using RViz windows with the click of a mouse. If this wasn't done at the beginning, the robot will start the auto-localization process and try to set an initial pose.

We can look upon the following screenshot for setting the initial pose. Here we will click on the 2D Pose Estimate button, and click on the map to point to the initial position of our robot:

• Topic: initialpose
• Type: geometry_msgs/PoseWithCovarianceStamped