ROS workspace and visualization

Question

Hello everyone,

I am a complete beginner to ROS and have question concerning, the structure of the ROS working environment. I got the Schunk robot from the link below into catkin_ws/src.

https://github.com/ipa320/schunk_modular_robotics

However, I still am not understanding the different folders and files and how they interact together to form the robot. Also i would like to visualize the robot. How can I do that?

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Originally posted by lisa.gebert on ROS Answers with karma: 3 on 2020-03-25

Post score: 0

Answer 1

You can visualize the robot by using the URDF provided in the schunk_description to make a moveit_config package of your robot, then running roslaunch your_moveit_package demo.launch. See the MoveIt tutorials for details.

Most of the other folders in the repository you linked contain packages with C++ nodes which control the product they refer to. They also contain a msg folder with the message format they use. There are tutorials for these concepts.

It is true that the documentation is not very rich, and not all packages follow strict standards. But the description package usually contains robot defintion files (URDF). The others you will have to read to understand how to use them.

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Originally posted by fvd with karma: 2180 on 2020-03-30

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by lisa.gebert on 2020-04-03:
Thank you for the answer!

Comment by lisa.gebert on 2020-04-03:
I have just created another question. I would highly appreciate it if you could also take a look.

https://answers.ros.org/question/348317/missing-link-in-manipulator-urdf-xacro-and-visualizing-in-rviz/

Thank you!

Comment by fvd on 2020-04-03:
Please accept this answer so the question is taken out of the queue.