Hello,
I am a beginner, trying to get a differential drive robot to navigate around obstacles in Gazebo Harmonic. I have made a basic differential drive robot .urdf file which includes the following:
<plugin filename="gz-sim-diff-drive-system" name="gz::sim::systems::DiffDrive">
<odom_publisher_frequency>50</odom_publisher_frequency>
<left_joint>left_wheel_joint</left_joint>
<right_joint>right_wheel_joint</right_joint>
<wheel_separation>0.35</wheel_separation>
<wheel_diameter>0.2</wheel_diameter>
<max_wheel_torque>20</max_wheel_torque>
<max_linear_acceleration>1.0</max_linear_acceleration>
<topic>cmd_vel</topic>
<publish_odom>true</publish_odom>
<publish_odom_tf>true</publish_odom_tf>
<publish_wheel_tf>true</publish_wheel_tf>
<odom_topic>odom</odom_topic>
<frame_id>odom</frame_id>
<child_frame_id>base_link</child_frame_id>
</plugin>
I believe this plugin should be publishing a /cmd_vel topic that I can use to command the robot’s velocity from some other node, e.g. a Nav2 node. However, when I check ros2 topic list I don’t see a /cmd_vel topic published.
Some searching around led me to this post: ros2 - No /odom and /cmd_vel topics with diff_drive plugin - Robotics Stack Exchange
where the authors had a similar issue. However, their solution was to install
ros-humble-gazebo-plugins
I am on Ubuntuu 24.04, so am using Jazzy, and my system cannot find ros-jazzy-gazebo-plugins.
Does anyone have any further advice on how to debug?