ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Viewing the seven DOF arm in RViz

After discussing the robot model, we can view the designed xacro file in RViz and control each joint using the joint state publisher node and publish the robot state using the Robot State Publisher.

The preceding task can be performed using a launch file called view_arm.launch, which is inside the launch folder of this package:

<launch> <arg name="model" /> <!-- Parsing xacro and loading robot_description parameter --> <param name="robot_description" command="$(find xacro)/xacro.py $(find mastering_ros_robot_description_pkg)/urdf/ seven_dof_arm.xacro " /> <!-- Setting gui parameter to true for display joint slider, for getting joint control --> <param name="use_gui" value="true"/> <!-- ...