The lwr_description package contains an URDF model of the 7-DOF KUKA LWR 4+ manipulator. A parameterized launch file was added to run the entire visualization. The shape of the manipulator was described by CAD files in COLLADA format (.dae), instead of geometric primitives, to mimic the real manipulator.
It is recommended to use Ubuntu 22.04 with ROS 2 Humble. There are 3 versions of ROS2 Humble Hawksbill to choose from: Desktop Install, ROS-Base Install and Development tools Install. Be sure to install Desktop Install version, because it includes GUI tools such as RViz.
Packages such as joint_state_publisher, joint_state_publisher_gui, robot_state_publisher, rviz2 and xacro are required to run the visualization. You can install them all at once using the sudo apt install ros-humble-urdf-tutorial command.
mkdir -p ~/ros2_ws/src
cd ~/ros2_ws/
git clone https://github.com/jkaniuka/kuka_lwr4plus_urdf.git -b ros2 src/
source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash
colcon build
. install/setup.bash
The command below will start the visualization and joint_state_publisher_gui node, which will allow you to control the manipulator.
ros2 launch lwr_description display.launch.py
If you want to write a custom node to control the manipulator by publishing messages on the /joint_states topic, run the visualization without joint_state_publisher_gui. You can do this by setting the use_gui argument to false (see below).
ros2 launch lwr_description display.launch.py use_gui:=false