ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Interacting with pan and tilt joints

We can see an extra GUI came along with RViz, which contains sliders to control pan joints and tilt joints. This GUI is called the Joint State Publisher node from the joint_state_publisher package:

  <node name="joint_state_publisher" pkg="joint_state_publisher" type="joint_state_publisher" /> 

We can include this node in the launch file using this statement. The limits of pan and tilt should be mentioned inside the joint tag:

  <joint name="pan_joint" type="revolute"> 
    <parent link="base_link"/> 
    <child link="pan_link"/> 
    <origin xyz="0 0 0.1"/> 
    <axis xyz="0 0 1" /> 
    <limit effort="300" velocity="0.1" lower="-3.14" upper="3.14"/> 
    <dynamics damping="50" friction="1"/> 
  </joint> 

The ...