Summary

In this chapter, we mainly looked at the importance of robot modeling and how we can model a robot in ROS. We discussed the packages that are used in ROS to model a robotic structure, such as urdf, xacro, and joint_state_publisher and its GUI. We discussed URDF, xacro, and the main URDF tags that we can use. We also created a sample model in URDF and xacro and discussed the differences between the two. Following this, we created a complex robotic manipulator with seven DOF and looked at the usage of the joint_state_publisher and robot_state_publisher packages. At the end of the chapter, we reviewed the design procedure of a differential drive mobile robot using xacro. In the next chapter, we will take a look at the simulation of these robots using Gazebo.