Issues getting meshed and continuous joint parts to show up right in Gazebo

[mattheartin]

First and foremost I know my joint state publisher and robot state publisher are working, as when I call ros2 topic echo on them it prints what it should.

However, when I boot gazebo, the links that are coming from a mesh do not appear at all and the links that are connected via continuous joints show up at (0 0 0) instead of their correct position. Further adding to my confusion is the fact that all of these parts show up just fine in rViz

I have 2 relevant launch files for this, spawn.launch.py and state_publisher.launch.py whose code is below. The urdf file is named tb3_burger.urdf.

spawn.launch.py - -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
from launch import LaunchDescription
from launch_ros.actions import Node
from ament_index_python.packages import get_package_share_directory
import os

def generate_launch_description():
urdf_file = os.path.join(
get_package_share_directory(‘ros2_urdf_project’), # Replace with actual package name
‘urdf’,
‘tb3_burger.urdf’ # Or .xacro
)

return LaunchDescription([
    Node(
        package='gazebo_ros',
        executable='spawn_entity.py',
        arguments=['-file', urdf_file, '-entity', 'tb3_burger'],
        output='screen'
    )
])

state_publisher.launch.py - -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
from launch import LaunchDescription
from launch_ros.actions import Node
from launch.substitutions import Command, PathJoinSubstitution
from launch_ros.substitutions import FindPackageShare
from launch.actions import DeclareLaunchArgument
from launch.substitutions import LaunchConfiguration

def generate_launch_description():

robot_description = {'robot_description': Command(['cat ', LaunchConfiguration('urdf_file')])}


# Allow passing xacro file path as argument
declare_urdf_arg = DeclareLaunchArgument(
    name='urdf_file',
    default_value=PathJoinSubstitution([
        '/home/user/ros2_ws/src/ros2_urdf_project',  # <-- adjust this to your actual path,
        'urdf',
        'tb3_burger.urdf'  # Replace with actual file
    ]),
    description='URDF/Xacro file'
)

#robot_description = {'robot_description': Command(['xacro ', LaunchConfiguration('urdf_file')])}

return LaunchDescription([
    declare_urdf_arg,

    # Joint State Publisher GUI
    Node(
        package='joint_state_publisher_gui',
        executable='joint_state_publisher_gui',
        name='joint_state_publisher_gui',
        output='screen',
    ),

    # Robot State Publisher
    Node(
        package='robot_state_publisher',
        executable='robot_state_publisher',
        name='robot_state_publisher',
        output='screen',
        parameters=[robot_description],
    )
])

If anyone could help me figure out what on earth is going awry, that would be great