ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Understanding joint state publisher

Joint state publisher is one of the ROS packages that is commonly used to interact with each joint of the robot. The package contains the joint_state_publisher node, which will find the nonfixed joints from the URDF model and publish the joint state values of each joint in the sensor_msgs/JointState message format.

In the preceding launch file, view_arm.launch, we started the joint_state_publisher node and set a parameter called use_gui to true as follows:

  <param name="use_gui" value="true"/> 
 
  <!-- Starting Joint state publisher node which will publish the joint values --> 
  <node name="joint_state_publisher" pkg="joint_state_publisher" type="joint_state_publisher" /> 

If we set use_gui to true, ...