The primary purpose of this ros2 module is to publish your URDF and SRDF to a topic for use by Rviz2, gazebo, robot dynamics and other nodes.

In some cases you may need to publish slightly different versions of a URDF file. I found this, for example, with Rviz2 and Gazebo requiring a few tweaks. It's easy to use xacro if(...) then...else to conditionally generate the differences but both versions must still be published. If you supply the targets argument then Resource Publisher will rerun xacro for each target and publish the variant with the target ID appended to the topic name.

The following example publishes two variants of the lss_humanoid.xacro.urdf file. The first variant has the target xacro parameter unset (null) and published on the topic /robot_description. The second variant has the target parameter set to 'gazebo' and is published on the topic /robot_description/gazebo.

     urdf_publisher = Node(
        package='resource_publisher',
        executable='resource_publisher',
        output='screen',
        arguments=[
            '-package', 'lss_humanoid',
            '-xacro', 'urdf/lss_humanoid.xacro.urdf',
            '-topic', 'robot_description',
            '-targets', '*,gazebo']
    )

An example publishing the SRDF document, this time without xacro:

    srdf_publisher = Node(
        package='resource_publisher',
        executable='resource_publisher',
        output='screen',
        arguments=[
            '-package', 'lss_hexapod',
            '-xacro', 'urdf/lss_hexapod.srdf',
            '-topic', 'robot_description/srdf']
    )

The documents will be published with latched QOS reliable reliability and transient_local durability which requires matching QOS parameters to retrieve the document with ros2 topic echo. The following example command will echo the full document:

ros2 topic echo --qos-reliability reliable --qos-durability transient_local --full-length /robot_description