Description
Original report (archived issue) by John Hsu (Bitbucket: hsu, GitHub: hsu).
Add instructions on how to create your own gazebo ros package to
the ros_launch tutorial.
Quoting original issue on gazebo_ros_pkgs below
This plugin is very useful, but I don't see it mentioned here:
http://gazebosim.org/wiki/Tutorials/1.9/Using_roslaunch_Files_to_Spawn_Models#Creating_your_own_Gazebo_ROS_Package
Would it make sense to add a section "Setting gazebo paths from ROS packages"? The useful info would be the format for exporting model paths from a package.xml:
<export>
<gazebo_ros gazebo_model_path="${prefix}/models"/>
<gazebo_ros gazebo_media_path="${prefix}/models"/>
</export>
The '${prefix}` is something that new users might not immediately know about either, and necessary here.
Also would be useful to have some info on how to debug these paths from the ROS side, e.g. that you can use rospack plugins --attrib="gazebo_media_path" gazebo_ros To check the media path that will be picked up by gazebo.
When I started using gazebo and ROS together, I didn't realize that the gazebo_ros_paths plugin existed, and spent a while doing things the hard way with custom shell scripts and cmake macros.