How to fix visualize_franka.sh Caught exception in launch: missing required argument 'arm_id'

Problem

You want to run scripts/visualize_franka.sh from the franka_description repository, but when you run it, you see the following error message:

[INFO] [launch]: All log files can be found below /home/user/.ros/log/2025-01-11-22-18-25-728882-226847ca30b0-161
[INFO] [launch]: Default logging verbosity is set to INFO
[ERROR] [launch]: Caught exception in launch (see debug for traceback): Included launch description missing required argument 'arm_id' (description: 'ID of the type of arm used. Supporter values: fer, fr3, fp3'), given: []

Solution

There are multiple types of Franka robots, including Franka Research 3, Franka Panda etc.

You need to specify which of these robots to actually use for visualization. You can do this by setting the arm_id argument when launching the visualization script:

./scripts/visualize_franka.sh arm_id:=fr3

fr3 means Franka Research 3. At the time of writing, the following values are supported:

• fer for Franka Emika Research
• fr3 for Franka Research 3
• fp3 for Franka Panda 3

but you can check which versions are supported for your version of the script by looking at the meshes/robot_arms directory or the README.

$ ls meshes/robot_arms/
fer/  fr3/  fp3/