This repo contains simple URDF robot definition and control of it via C++ joint state publisher

Prober - is a robot designed to explore unknown terrains by probing ground, processing samples, and transmitting them to the base station.

Thus it consists of:

• Mobile platform - to reach the target location
• Probe - to perform an experiment
• Radar - to transmit the results

Here is the Prober robot in Rviz:

URDF graph for the Prober:

And here is a ROS graph when create_robot.launch is running:

As we can see here, /joint_position_controller publishes Prober's current joint state into the /joint_states topic. At the same time /robot_state_publisher is listenning for messages in /joint_states, and if a message arrives, it converts it into /tf format which is consumed by Rviz.

• Add the urdf_prober_robot package to your catkin_ws/src
• Execute catkin_make && source devel/setup.bash
• Execute roslaunch urdf_prober_robot create_robot.launch

If you want to generate the URDF graph use those commands:

1. rosrun xacro xacro robot.urdf > model.urdf
2. urdf_to_graphiz model.urdf

1. makes sure no Xacro macroses are left in the robot.urdf and 2. produces the model.pdf file