I use Gazebo 7 with ROS Jade for which ros-jade-gazebo7-ros-pkgs cannot yet be installed (due to the dependency to ros-jade-gazebo7-plugins which does not exist). Thus, I've cloned the jade-devel branch of the gazebo_ros_pkgs package in the catkin workspace and compiled it with catkin_make. EDITED after ros-jade-gazebo7-ros-pkgs release: still the same behaviour.

Issue created on 2016/03/08

Check the details in the issue and follow the linked repository: https://bitbucket.org/osrf/sdformat/i...

Update 2016/03/01

I've been investigated more on this problem and I've found out that it could be due to the new naming convention from Gazebo 6 on.* I've tried the example below with ROS Jade and Gazebo 5, 6 and 7 and it works only with the first one (which relies on *sdformat2).

Using sdformat3 and sdformat4, <visual> and <collision> elements get augmented unique names when they are converted to SDF (which differ from those given in the URDF). Indeed, using <gazebo> tags it is possible to add any element which will not end in <visual> or <collision> elements, e.g. <enable_wind> or <velocity_decay> which are directly children of the <link> tag.

On the other hand, every element which has to be put inside <visual> or <collision> is completely ignored (without errors) from the parser. I think that it expects to use the URDF visual/collision names but they differ, e.g. visual_waist and collision_waist are the name in the URDF and the respectively SDF ones are waist_fixed_joint_lump__visual_waist_visual and waist_fixed_joint_lump__collision_waist_collision.

Should I report this bug on https://bitbucket.org/osrf/sdformat/o... ?

Example

I have made a simple example (download) to show that (at least with my configuration) elements inside <gazebo> urdf tags are not correctly parsed by either spawn_model or gz sdf -p commands.

I followed this Gazebo tutorial: Using a URDF in Gazebo.

This is the package structure inside my caktkin workspace:

/robot:
  /robot_description:
    /urdf:
      robot.gazebo
      robot.urdf
      robot.xacro
    CMakeLists.txt
    package.xml
  /robot_gazebo:
    /launch:
      robot_world.launch
    /worlds:
      robot.world
    CMakeLists.txt
    package.xml

where robot.world is a simple empty world and robot_world.launch contains the URDF spawner:

<param name="robot_description"
       command="$(find xacro)/xacro --inorder '$(find robot_description)/urdf/robot.xacro'"/>

<node name="urdf_spawner" pkg="gazebo_ros" type="spawn_model" respawn="false" output="screen" 
      args="-urdf -model robot -param robot_description"/>

and where the file in the /urdf folder are as follow:

robot.xacro

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<robot name="robot" xmlns:xacro="http://www.ros.org/wiki/xacro">
  <!-- imports all Gazebo-customization elements, including Gazebo colors -->
  <xacro:include filename="$(find robot_description)/urdf/robot.gazebo"/>
  <!-- imports URDF robot model -->
  <xacro:include filename="$(find robot_description)/urdf/robot.urdf"/>
</robot>

robot.urdf

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<robot name="robot">

  <link name="pelvis">
    <inertial>
      <origin xyz="-1e-06 0.060095 -0.014315" rpy="0 0 0"/>
      <mass value="2.468"/>
      <inertia ixx="0.015171" ixy="0" ixz="0" iyy="0.022628" iyz="0" izz="0.018252"/>
    </inertial>
    <visual name="visual_pelvis">
      <origin xyz="-4.5e-05 0.021 -0.01302" rpy="0 0 0"/>
      <geometry ...