Hands-On ROS for Robotics Programming

Helpful ROS tools for checking purposes

Finally, you should know that there are two helpful ROS tools if you want to make some checks:

• check_urdf attempts to parse a URDF file in order to verify the kinematic chain:

$ roscd rviz_basics$ check_urdf ./urdf/gopigoMinimal.urdf

The roscd command changes the prompt to the path of the ROS package whose name you are indicating as an argument, that is, rviz_basics. The output is as follows, where the current folder is the rviz_basics path, as requested, that is, ~/catkin_ws/src/CH4_RVIZ_BASICS before the $ sign:

~/catkin_ws/src/CH4_RVIZ_BASICS$ check_urdf ./urdf/gopigoMinimal.urdfrobot name is: gopigoMinimal---------- Successfully Parsed XML ---------------root Link: base_link has 2 child(ren)