[ros-users] Easy way to broadcast tf from a urdf?

[Mike Phillips]

Hi,
We have a urdf of a robot which we are using to run our robot in
gazebo.  The robot displays properly in rviz and I believe that gazebo
is broadcasting the transforms using the information from the urdf.
My question is if there is a package that will provide this
functionality so that if we want to run this on the real robot (and
therefore are not using gazebo) the transforms would still all get
published.  I could create a bunch of tf broadcasters for each of the
joints but I thought there might be a simpler way especially since
gazebo already seems to do this.  This would especially be helpful for
the many fixed joints in the robot so that I wouldn't have to
replicate much of the urdf with several static_transform_publisher.

Thanks,
-Mike-