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As far as I know, there is no direct way to set joint positions in Gazebo. However, you can apply a force/effort at a joint for a specific duration and move the connected links that way. Have a look at Gazebo's apply_joint_effort. To move the joint to a specific position, you'll have to implement a position controller.

Alternatively, you can implement a gazebo plugin that controls your joints directly, something similar to the gazebo_controller_manager. Maybe you can even use it.

A third alternative is to compute the link poses of your simulated hand manually using forward kinematics and just set the resulting link poses in gazebo. The joint values should be updated automatically (related post).