A ROS-Gazebo Interface for the Katana Robotic Arm Manipulation

Nowadays, simulators are being used more and more during the development of robotic systems due to the efficiency of the development and testing processes of such applications. Undoubtedly, these simulators save time, resources and costs, as well as enable ease of demonstrations of the system. Specifically, tools like the open source Robotic Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo have gained popularity in building models of robotic systems. ROS is extensively used in robotics due to the pros of hardware abstraction and code reuse. The Gazebo platform is used for visualisation because of its high compatibility with ROS. In this paper, ROS and Gazebo have been integrated to build an interface for the visualisation of the Katana Arm manipulator.