Best practice on how to import custom .xarco.urdf

[tombanfi]

Hi there,
I was wandering if you may kindly provide some best practice on how to import custom .xarco.urdf file. As an example, I was trying to use studio's URDF viewer to load this .xarco.urdf file without success. I tested this using both the .deb image on a Ubuntu 18.04 and using the provided docker image, both test were run using ROS Foxy. A way to get more informative (stack trace?) error messages may also be very helpful to allow independent debug of such issues.

Thank you

[defunctzombie]

The error is not very helpful:

I looked into this for this file and the reason for the failed to load error is due to the meshes used within the urdf file:

<mesh filename="../meshes/ur5e/visual/base.dae"/>

Studio tries to open those but it cannot find them since they use relative paths.

For ROS systems, you can use the package:// prefix and reference the meshes from specific packages. You'll want to set the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH setting in Studio accordingly:

https://foxglove.dev/docs/app-concepts/preferences