Given some data of odometry of wheels and laser data this demo constructs using gmapping a map.

You can just launch:

roslaunch turtlebot_laser_work launch_all.launch

And it will launch all the necesarry stuff:

• wheels velocities publisher
• laser data publisher
• odom publisher from wheels info
• gmapping
• needed transforms (base_footprint to laser_link)
• rviz to watch what is happening

The result looks like:

Also you can try

roslaunch turtlebot_laser_work launch_laser_only.launch

To use laser_scan_matcher to publish odom frame. The results are a lot worse.

The result looks like:

To use this last one you must clone: https://github.com/ccny-ros-pkg/scan_tools

and compile it in your workspace (laser_scan_matcher is there).