Workstation rviz "Could not load model" Error

Question

For the last couple of days I've been trying to run the preinstalled rviz virtualization demo from my workstation rather than the Turtlebot 2 Asus Laptop and have been unable to successfully load rviz on my workstation. When loading rviz on my workstation I receive the following error in the output:

justyn@justyn-M17xR3:~$ roslaunch turtlebot_rviz_launchers view_robot.launch ... logging to /home/justyn/.ros/log/f1d3b6d8-df6e-11e2-a8cb-446d57eca273/roslaunch-justyn-M17xR3-13144.log Checking log directory for disk usage. This may take awhile. Press Ctrl-C to interrupt Done checking log file disk usage. Usage is

I am using a Turtlebot 2 with a Kobuki base and Kinect sensor. I have installed the full desktop installation of Groovy in Ubuntu and I am able to get a result from "rostopic list" so my connection to the Turtlebot from my workstation is working. Can anyone point me to the fix for this?

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: My apologies for the many postings, the Ask Your Question page kept giving me a 504 Gateway Timeout that did not confirm my question had been submitted. Once again sorry!

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Originally posted by JHarriman on ROS Answers with karma: 5 on 2013-06-28

Post score: 0

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Original comments

Comment by JHarriman on 2013-07-15:
I still have the problem on the workstation I was using, I've since switched to a different workstation (physically different) with the same install and it worked.

Comment by kevinma on 2013-08-04:
Hi, I also encountered the same problem. Since I bought a complete set of turtlebot, which means it comes with a pre-installed ROS on turtlebot netbook (Asus), I found that I could load rviz with a correct turtlebot model on the netbook, but on the workstation I got the error message and could only see the model of Kinect. Therefore, I tried to find the difference. Here is what I found:

1. in /opt/ros/groovy/stacks/kobuki_description/meshes: turtlebot netbook: there are base.dae and wheel.dae workstation: there are main_body.dae and wheel.dae

2. If I copied base.dae to the directory on turtlebot netbook, there would be no error message and the kobuki base model showed, but in a very small scale. I guess the setups in base.dae and in main_body.dae are quite different.

Is this because of two different versions of view_model.launch mixing up? Is it a bug or I missed something in workstation installation? I would appreciate it if anyone provides any suggestions.

Answer 1

Sounds like you have different versions of the debs on both turtlebot and workstation. Make sure you have the same versions.

There was also a change in the way rviz handles the meshes midway through groovy that wasn't ideal - introduced a breaking change in the way it handled scaling of the meshes. We updated the kobuki meshes to be compatible and I suspect that's where you're seeing the differences here.

Anyway, update and let us know how you fare.

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Originally posted by Daniel Stonier with karma: 3170 on 2013-08-06

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 3

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Original comments

Comment by kevinma on 2013-08-07:
Thank you, Daniel. Yes. It turns out that the pre-installed versions of the ROS debs on the Asus netbook coming from Yujin Robot are old, which I got in July, and the versions I installed on my workstation are new. After I installed turtlebot debs again on the turtlebot netbook, it works fine now. By the way, I have hydro + raring on the workstation and groovy + precise on the turtlebot. When I load rviz on the workstation, some error messages show like: Skipping XML Document "/opt/ros/hydro/share/rviz_python_tutorial/plugin_description.xml" which had no Root Element. This likely means the XML is malformed or missing. However, it doesn't seem to affect the rviz window display and performance.

Comment by Stonier@Yujin Robot on 2013-08-07:
Probably want to avoid mixing groovy and hydro. When turtlebot hydro is ready (very close), it's probably a good idea to upgrade that one.

Comment by JHarriman on 2013-08-16:
As kevinma said, I had the same issue with pre-installed debs on the Asus netbook. I have since updated and everything works fine.