rviz/DisplayTypes/RobotModel

RobotModel

The Robot Model display shows links of a robot (defined by a urdf), in their correct poses according to the tf transform tree.

Properties
Name	Description	Valid Values	Default
Visual Enabled	Enables drawing the visual representation of the robot	True, False	True
Collision Enabled	Enables drawing the collision representation of the robot	True, False	False
Update Rate	The rate at which to update the pose of each link, in seconds. Setting this to a small value will have performance implications	0.01+	0.1
Alpha	The amount of transparency to apply to the links	[0-1]	1
Robot Description	The parameter to retrieve the urdf from. Uses `searchParam()` to search up the parameter tree for the value specified.	Any valid Graph Resource Name	robot_description
TF Prefix	New in cturtle. Sets the TF prefix to prepend to the link names loaded from the urdf	Any valid tf prefix	empty
Per-link Properties
Show Trail	Draws a trail behind the link. The trail originates from the origin of the link.	True, False	False
Show Axes	Draws axes at the origin of the link.	True, False	False

URDF

The Robot Description parameter must be embedded xml, not the path to the file on disc. You can load the XML with a launch file:

<launch>
    <param name="robot_description" textfile="$(find packagename)/model.xml" />
</launch>

The Robot Model display requires the URDF to have a visual or collision tag defined in order to view your robot. See the <visual> and <collision> sections on the Link XML Format