There are two options or environments to simulate the robot, RViz and Gazebo.

The bringup in RViz offers a visualization of the robot description and its current state, be it just in simulation or the real robot. Simply execute roslaunch irb140_sim irb140_rviz.launch, this will load the robot description in the ROS parameter server and it can be then visualized in the RViz gui with its current joint states, this will also execute the joint-state-publisher-gui so the joint angles can be set manually using sliders.

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Executing roslaunch irb140_sim irb140_gazebo.launch will load the robot in a Gazebo sim world, where the robot can interact with objects with simulated physics.

This launch involves more than just the robot description, it also loads a joint_trajectory_controller that allows to control each joint of the robot separately in the means of angular positions.

(There are other ROS controllers that allow to command velocities and even torques, but here we just use angular position control).

To command easily the Gazebo robot joints, in a new terminal execute rqt, this will open a tool that offers a graphical interface for several ROS tools, in this case we are interested in the rqt_joint_trajectory_controller gui, this tool is found in the Plugins menu as follows: rqt>Plugins>Robot Tools>Joint Trajectory controller

This will open an interface with a slider for each joint defined in the controller to be controlled.

The gripper in Gazebo uses a position type joint trajectory controller. Using the joint mimic plugin for Gazebo, it's only needed to command one joint.

If everything until here has executed correctly, it means that the installation was successful and the next packages or functionalities are ready to be used. The RViz and Gazebo bringups are the base applications/environments of this collection of packages.

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