Resource Publisher

The primary purpose of this ros2 module is to publish your URDF and SRDF to a topic for use by Rviz2, gazebo, robot dynamics and other nodes.

Multiple URDF Variants

In some cases you may need to publish slightly different versions of a URDF file. I found this, for example, with Rviz2 and Gazebo requiring a few tweaks. It's easy to use xacro if(...) then...else to conditionally generate the differences but both versions must still be published. If you supply the targets argument then Resource Publisher will rerun xacro for each target and publish the variant with the target ID appended to the topic name.

Arguments

Argument	parameter	Description
--package	<PKG_NAME>	The package containing the document resource to publish
--xacro	<FILE_NAME>	The xacro file to substitute with parameters (found within the given package)
--topic	<TOPIC_NAME>	topic to publish on. Target name will also be appended if set.
--targets		Comma-seperated list of targets. Each value will be passed to the xacro file as a "target" parameter and published on a new topic. Use * for target.

Example Launch Description

The following example publishes two variants of the lss_humanoid.xacro.urdf file. The first variant has the target xacro parameter unset (null) and published on the topic /robot_description. The second variant has the target parameter set to 'gazebo' and is published on the topic /robot_description/gazebo.

     urdf_publisher = Node(
        package='resource_publisher',
        executable='resource_publisher',
        output='screen',
        arguments=[
            '-package', 'lss_humanoid',
            '-xacro', 'urdf/lss_humanoid.xacro.urdf',
            '-topic', 'robot_description',
            '-targets', '*,gazebo']
    )

An example publishing the SRDF document, this time without xacro:

    srdf_publisher = Node(
        package='resource_publisher',
        executable='resource_publisher',
        output='screen',
        arguments=[
            '-package', 'lss_hexapod',
            '-xacro', 'urdf/lss_hexapod.srdf',
            '-topic', 'robot_description/srdf']
    )

Echo Published Documents

The documents will be published with latched QOS reliable reliability and transient_local durability which requires matching QOS parameters to retrieve the document with ros2 topic echo. The following example command will echo the full document:

ros2 topic echo --qos-reliability reliable --qos-durability transient_local --full-length /robot_description