rviz: rviz RobotModel broken in melodic: not used

The following two pictures will likely tell the whole story: Kinetic on 16.04 Melodic on 18.04

It appears that the <origin> tag within <visual> and <collision> is not taken into account anymore. This breaks most of our existing URDF models.

URDF:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<robot name="abc">
  <link name="a_link">
    <visual name="a_visual">
      <origin xyz="-0.5 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
      <geometry>
        <mesh filename="package://rviz_melodic_urdf_issue/a.dae" scale="1.0 1.0 1.0" />
      </geometry>
    </visual>
  </link>
  <joint name="a_b_joint" type="fixed">
    <parent link="a_link"/>
    <child link="b_link"/>
    <origin xyz="0 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
  </joint>
  <link name="b_link">
    <visual name="b_visual">
      <origin xyz="0 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
      <geometry>
        <mesh filename="package://rviz_melodic_urdf_issue/b.dae" scale="1.0 1.0 1.0" />
      </geometry>
    </visual>
  </link>
  <joint name="b_c_joint" type="fixed">
    <parent link="b_link"/>
    <child link="c_link"/>
    <origin xyz="0 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
  </joint>
  <link name="c_link">
    <visual name="c_visual">
      <origin xyz="0.5 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
      <geometry>
        <mesh filename="package://rviz_melodic_urdf_issue/c.dae" scale="1.0 1.0 1.0" />
      </geometry>
    </visual>
  </link>
</robot>

Clone https://github.com/andreasBihlmaier/rviz_melodic_urdf_issue into catkin workspace, build and run

roslaunch urdf_tutorial display.launch model:=`rospack find rviz_melodic_urdf_issue`/abc.urdf

Update: Geometric primitives, e.g. <box> are not shown at all: Kinetic on 16.04 Melodic on 18.04 URDF:


<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<robot name="boxes">
  <link name="a_link">
    <visual name="a_visual">
      <origin xyz="-0.5 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
      <geometry>
        <box size="0.1 1 0.1" />
      </geometry>
    </visual>
  </link>
  <joint name="a_b_joint" type="fixed">
    <parent link="a_link"/>
    <child link="b_link"/>
    <origin xyz="0 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
  </joint>
  <link name="b_link">
    <visual name="b_visual">
      <origin xyz="0 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
      <geometry>
        <box size="0.1 1 0.1" />
      </geometry>
    </visual>
  </link>
  <joint name="b_c_joint" type="fixed">
    <parent link="b_link"/>
    <child link="c_link"/>
    <origin xyz="0 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
  </joint>
  <link name="c_link">
    <visual name="c_visual">
      <origin xyz="0.5 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
      <geometry>
        <box size="0.1 1 0.1" />
      </geometry>
    </visual>
  </link>
</robot>

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 6 years ago
Comments: 18 (9 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Appreciate the VM @andreasBihlmaier, that helped.

After a fair bit of investigation I tracked the cause down to differences in locale. On my machines, origins were being parsed as origin: -0.500000, 0.000000, 0.000000 while on yours the equivalent would get parsed as origin: -0,000000, 0,000000, 0,000000 (the commas are what tipped me off).

Turns out this is a known issue with urdfdom, which has been addressed in urdfdom_headers. It doesn’t seem that the fix has been released into melodic, however. I will followup on that to try to get the fix into melodic if it’s feasible (that’s released as an upstream ubuntu package as opposed to a standard ROS package, so maybe not).

In the meantime a workaround is to unset/modify the LC_NUMERIC environment variable, e.g. export LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8".

Can others please confirm that modifying the locale fixes it for them?

+12

dhood on Jul 9, 2018

Also, if anyone else can spend time to confirm this bug and/or suggest a solution in a pull request that would be great.

wjwwood on May 31, 2018

Thanks for the detailed report and examples. We’ll have a look as soon as possible.

wjwwood on May 31, 2018