(I’ve already posted to both Robotics Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow, but got no answer and barely any views, I’m asking here for visibility)
I’m trying to use some rather old ROS packages to control a simple Gazebo simulation of a Robotis OP1 robot, using the darwin_description and darwin_control packages, but I’m facing a weird issue, whenever I use the bundled launch file in darwin_control I get the following messages/warning:
[INFO] [1729969219.133353, 0.000000]: Controller Spawner: Waiting for service controller_manager/load_controller
[WARN] [1729969249.437919, 97.394000]: Controller Spawner couldn't find the expected controller_manager ROS interface.
with the spawner node eventually terminating with no controller loaded.
Prior to launching controllers, I’m successfully spawning the URDF model in Gazebo in a rather straightforward manner:
rosparam load src/darwin_description/urdf/darwin.urdf /robot_description
roslaunch gazebo_ros empty_world.launch
rosrun gazebo_ros spawn_model -param /darwin/robot_description -urdf -model darwin
If relevant, I’m using a virtual machine w/ Ubuntu and ROS installation; I’ve read that controller_manager initialization is resource-dependent and may hang on virtual systems.
I am also sure these packages somehow worked in ROS1 Melodic, so I wonder if the issue is somehow caused by some update to ros-noetic-controller-manager; in any case, I’m not sure what is missing here.