Modify the robot_description parameter at runtime
Hello,
I am trying to put identified offsets to the nominal URDF-values of my industrial robot. Since I do not want to modify the support package of my robot, I thought a good way to insert the identified rotary and translation offsets would be to change the robot_description on the parameter server.
Is there a more elegant way to fulfill my goal, or do I really have to modify the string from the robot_description parameter?
Is it even possible or advisable to change values of the robot description at runtime?
Thanks for all recommendations.
it's possible, but there are a whole host of potential issues with it.
I can't find them right now, but there have been discussions about this in the past. Main issue is that consumers of URDFs do not ..
.. expect the parameter (so
robot_description) to ever change. So even if you update it, almost no readily available software that consumes URDF/XACRO will ever load it more than once, and will not see your updated content.Well that sounds pretty disappointing. Are there any possibilities to include my identified URDF-Offsets, without directly changing the URDF then?
That's what I thought. I figured that the robot description is probably loaded once by all instances, that use it (like moveit).