joint state publisher dies, cannot attach wheels with continuous joint

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Hi,

I am currently trying to create a simple differential drive robot model with 2 wheels and 2 caster wheels, but I cannot attach the wheels to the chassis with continuous/revolute joints and I do not get the transforms of course, but I can connect them with fixed joints and I also get the correct transforms with the fixed joints.

I am using ros melodic with Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS on VM 6.0.12

• /rosdistro: melodic
• /rosversion: 1.14.3

Here is the error message I get:

Error Message

SUMMARY

PARAMETERS 
* /joint_state_publisher/use_gui: True 
* /robot_description: <?xml version="1....
* /rosdistro: melodic
* /rosversion: 1.14.3

NODES 
/ joint_state_publisher (joint_state_publisher/joint_state_publisher)
 robot_state_publisher (robot_state_publisher/state_publisher) 
 rviz (rviz/rviz)

auto-starting new master 
process[master]: started with pid [18519] 
ROS_MASTER_URI=http://localhost:11311

setting /run_id to 2a1bb272-f0b9-11e9-b0ed-080027935df5 
process[rosout-1]: started with pid [18530] 
started core service [/rosout] 
process[joint_state_publisher-2]: started with pid [18533] 
process[robot_state_publisher-3]: started with pid [18538] 
process[rviz-4]: started with pid [18539] 
Traceback (most recent call last): File "/opt/ros/melodic/lib/joint_state_publisher/joint_state_publisher", line 474, in jsp = JointStatePublisher() 
File "/opt/ros/melodic/lib/joint_state_publisher/joint_state_publisher", line 149, in init robot = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(description) 
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 1928, in parseString return expatbuilder.parseString(string) 
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 940, in parseString return builder.parseString(string) 
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 223, in parseString parser.Parse(string, True) 
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u202c' in position 5988: ordinal not in range(128) [joint_state_publisher-2] process has died [pid 18533, exit code 1, cmd /opt/ros/melodic/lib/joint_state_publisher/joint_state_publisher __name:=joint_state_publisher __log:=/home/user/.ros/log/2a1bb272-f0b9-11e9-b0ed-080027935df5/joint_state_publisher-2.log]. log file: /home/user/.ros/log/2a1bb272-f0b9-11e9-b0ed-080027935df5/joint_state_publisher-2*.log

URDF file

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<robot name="mybot">

  <link name="base_footprint"/>

  <joint name="base_joint" type="fixed">
    <parent link="base_footprint"/>
    <child link="chassis" />
    <origin xyz="0 0 0.010" rpy="0 0 0"/>
  </joint>

  <link name="chassis">
    <collision name="base_collision">
      <origin rpy="0 0 0" xyz="0 0 0.35"/>
      <geometry>
        <box size="1 1.8 0.4"/>
      </geometry>
    </collision>
    <visual name="base_visual">
      <origin rpy="0 0 0" xyz="0 0 0.35"/>
      <geometry>
        <box size="1 1.8 0.4"/>
      </geometry>
    </visual>
    <collision name="l_side_collision">
      <origin rpy="0 0 0" xyz="-0.475 0 1.18"/>
      <geometry>
        <box size="0.05 1.8 2.0"/>
      </geometry>
    </collision>
    <visual name="l_side_visual">
      <origin rpy="0 0 0" xyz="-0.475 0 1.18"/>
      <geometry>
        <box size="0.05 1.8 2.0"/>
      </geometry>
    </visual>
    <collision name="r_side_long_collision">
      <origin rpy="0 0 0" xyz="0.475 0.45 1.18"/>
      <geometry>
        <box size="0.05 0.9 2.0"/>
      </geometry>
    </collision>
    <visual name="r_side_long_visual">
      <origin rpy ...