[Windows & Iron] Issues with Running URDF Tutorial of the Building a Visual Robot Model with URDF from Scratch tutorial on Windows

[songyuc]

I have been following the Building a Visual Robot Model with URDF from Scratch tutorial using ROS 2 on Windows. I encountered an issue when executing the command to launch the display.launch.py file in the One Shape section:

ros2 launch urdf_tutorial display.launch.py model:=urdf/01-myfirst.urdf

The terminal returned a file not found error: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified. even though the 01-myfirst.urdf file exists in the urdf directory within the urdf_tutorial package. I attempted the command modification suggested in the tutorial to work regardless of the current working directory, but it returned an unrecognized argument error.

ros2: error: unrecognized arguments: --share urdf_tutorial`/urdf/01-myfirst.urdf

I would like to know if this tutorial is supported on Windows and if there are additional steps required to run it successfully on this platform. Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[mjcarroll]

It may be that this tutorial needs to be updated to take advantage of file-content substitution, which was added late in the iron release cycle: ros2/launch#708

[songyuc]

Hi, @mjcarroll,

If possible, I would greatly appreciate your assistance in updating the tutorial to address these Windows-specific challenges. Additionally, if there are any suggestions or temporary workarounds I could try in the meantime, I would be grateful for your guidance.

Thank you for your time and dedication to maintaining the ROS documentation. Your efforts greatly aid learners like myself in navigating and utilizing ROS more effectively.

Looking forward to your response.

Best regards,
Yucheng Song

[sloretz]

@clalancette is it possible ros2/launch#708 needs a backport? 🧇

[clalancette]

@clalancette is it possible ros2/launch#708 needs a backport? 🧇

Well, we already backported it to iron a while ago. We never did backport it to humble, though I don't think that is what this issue is asking for (since it was filed against iron).

That said, in the meantime we actually have removed the problematic portion of this documentation. In particular, urdf_tutorial now depends on urdf_launch, which has some of this functionality built-in. So it is possible that nothing more needs to be done here, and that can be used directly.

@songyuc Can you give this another try on Windows?

[songyuc]

Hi, @clalancette,

I retry reimplementing the tutorial to launch a URDF model using the display.launch.py script in the urdf_tutorial package. However, I am encountering an error saying "file not found: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified".

The URDF files are located in D:\second_ros2_ws\install\share\urdf_tutorial\urdf\ and the display.launch.py is in D:\second_ros2_ws\install\share\urdf_tutorial\launch\.

The command I am running is:

ros2 launch urdf_tutorial display.launch.py model:=install/share/urdf_tutorial/urdf/01-myfirst.urdf

And the error message is:

[INFO] [launch]: All log files can be found below C:\Users\songyuc.ros\log\2023-11-19-00-22-09-620153-DESKTOP-OB91EPG-8384
[INFO] [launch]: Default logging verbosity is set to INFO
[ERROR] [launch]: Caught exception in launch (see debug for traceback): file not found: 
[CN] [WinError 2] 系统找不到指定的文件。
[EN] [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified.

I have tried checking the ROS2 environment configuration and my Python environment, but everything seems to be in order.

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.