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I have a Gazebo simulation running with a spawned robot. I also have initialized two trajectory-based controllers using JointEffortInterface for Gazebo-ROS plugin - arm_controller and gripper_controller. I am using MoveIt Group Commander for these two controllers.

I suspect these controllers are shut down at some point in time of the simulation and throw the following error when trying to read /joint_states topic:

[ERROR]: Didn't receive robot state (joint angles) with recent timestamp within 1 seconds.
Check clock synchronization if your are running ROS across multiple machines!

Is there a way I can check if these controllers are enabled and running at any time during the simulation?

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    $\begingroup$ Do you mean like these are ROS services? Something else? It's not clear to me what's throwing your errors, but when you say you get an error when trying to read /joint_states topic I would guess the error there is with whatever is supposed to be publishing the /joint_states topic (I would think this should be Gazebo) and not with the thing subscribing to the topic (the controllers). First thing I would do is look at rostopic info /joint_states and see what the publisher is. $\endgroup$
    – Chuck
    Aug 2, 2022 at 18:30
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    $\begingroup$ Also if you're in simulation, especially if the simulation is running slower than realtime, you may need to rosparam set /use_sim_time true before running your simulations. Remember that nodes/services won't pick up that parameter if you set it after starting them, so be sure to restart any nodes/services after setting /use_sim_time true. $\endgroup$
    – Chuck
    Aug 2, 2022 at 18:31
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    $\begingroup$ Thanks for your responses! The error was being thrown since the simulation was paused and my MoveIt /move_group node was not able to access the /joint_states topic. Your point about the issue being with the publisher got me thinking - thanks! $\endgroup$
    – rl4haai
    Aug 4, 2022 at 14:04
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    $\begingroup$ I already had the use_sim_time parameter set True. Thanks again for providing the explanation on its usage! $\endgroup$
    – rl4haai
    Aug 4, 2022 at 14:05

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I was able to keep a track of the controllers and their states using:

import rospy
from controller_manager_msgs.srv import ListControllers

__list_controllers = rospy.ServiceProxy("/controller_manager/list_controllers", ListControllers)

__list_controllers.call() #whenever required
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