ROS Packages

Setup

To use ROS packages with Verbotics Cell Editor, you’ll need to first update the key ROS details in the ROS window. This includes:

  • Directories containing catkin workspaces

  • ROS location (most often installed under a prefix, with each version under /opt/ros)

  • ROS version

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You can find these in the ROS section of preferences, which you can open from the ribbon menu.

For entering multiple catkin workspaces, seperate each catkin workspace with the “;” character. Alternatively, selecting a workspace directory using the … button adds the newly selected workspace at the end of the current list of workspaces.

Importing

To import a ROS package, select the ROS option in the ribbon menu. This will open the Import ROS Package window. If you’ve correctly setup ROS, you should find a list of ROS packages available to import.

Selecting one of these packages will auto-populate either the URDF file to import or the SRDF file to import with the appropriate file depending on your selection.

In addition to this, you will need to specify the Distance Unit and Angle Unit to be used when importing, by default this is meters and radians but should be set to match the file being imported.

Finally, you can also enable the Scale Meshes checkbox if your cell requires scaling, this is performed as a step in the ROS package itself.

Exporting

When exporting a cell as a ROS package, you will need to specify:

  • Package Name

  • Package location

  • Open in RViz when complete?

After inputting a valid name and location, click OK to export the package.

Note

The behaviour when Saving ROS packages depends on the input URDF and SRDF files. Cell Editor will never overwrite files that have been processed by the xacro preprocessor, these will instead be saved alongside the original file. Otherwise, the behaviour is to overwrite the URDF and SRDF file that have been opened.

It is possible to open a URDF file without a corresponding SRDF file. In this instance, a .srdf file will be created with the same filename as the URDF file, and placed in the same directory.