Let's see how an ROS controller interacts with Gazebo. The following figure shows the interconnection of the ROS controller, robot hardware interface, and simulator/real hardware:
We can see the third-party tools, the navigation and MoveIt packages. These packages can give the goal (set point) to the mobile robot controllers and robotic arm controllers. These controllers can send the position, velocity, or effort to the robot hardware interface.
The hardware interface allocates each resource to the controllers and sends values to each resource. The ...