Outdoor trailer URDF model

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You do not need Gazebo when you are working with the real hardware. Ideally, your packages should be set up so that they are agnostic to the vehicle running as a simulation in Gazebo or as real hardware.

Gazebo is not a visualisation tool, so when running the real hardware you should not expect Gazebo to respond.

Gazebo is providing joint position information and publishing transforms based on its simulation of the vehicle's bodies and joints. For your hardware, you will need to provide this information yourself. For example, you could put an encoder on the joint so that you can publish the position of the pivot between the powered vehicle and the trailer. You should publish this information to the /joint_states topic. The URDF tutorials have a good tutorial on how to do this. (For testing your URDF in rviz, you can use the joint_state_publisher GUI tool, which will mimic the joint position moving.)

Once you have the joint state being published, you need to publish the updated transforms to /tf. The robot_state_publisher node can do this for you automatically. It reads in your URDF and looks for new joint states, then publishes the updated transforms automatically.

When you get transforms flowing, everything will magically start working. rviz will display your articulated vehicle in its correct state, and you will be able to get the pose of the camera relative to the powered vehicle or to any other frame easily from tf.