Publishing TFs and Packaging the URDF

So far, in Part 3 of this book, you’ve had an introduction to TFs and have learned how to write a URDF, which will be used to generate the TFs for your robotics application. There are now two things we need to do to go further.

First, to be quicker, we have used the urdf_tutorial package to publish the TFs. This is great to get started and visualize the robot model, but we won’t use this package in a real application. The question is this then: Using the URDF we have created, how do we generate the TFs for our application? What nodes do we need to start? We will first understand, through experimentation, what nodes and parameters we need to start to correctly generate the TFs for our application. From this, we will be able to create our own launch file.

Second, the URDF is now a series of three Xacro files placed inside the home directory. To start a proper ROS 2 application, we will create a package to organize and install...