Following my decisions of yesterday, I started to implement the code required to manipulate the robot model in rviz directly. This is slightly different that expected.

Messages should not be published to the joint_state_publisher node directly. The control node should generate its own JointState messages, and the joint_state_publisher node has a parameter to use this information instead of the sliders. See the doc on the ROS wiki.

Everything will be then managed in a .launch file. Still bugged this evening:

That does not look bad and it should be OK tomorrow.