Understanding robot modeling using URDF

We have discussed the urdf package. In this section, we will look further into the URDF XML tags, which help to model the robot. We have to create a file and write the relationship between each link and joint in the robot and save the file with the  .urdf extension.

URDF can represent the kinematic and dynamic description of the robot, the visual representation of the robot, and the collision model of the robot.

The following tags are the commonly used URDF tags to compose a URDF robot model:

• link: The link tag represents a single link of a robot. Using this tag, we can model a robot link and its properties. The modeling includes the size, the shape, and the color, and it can even import a 3D mesh to represent the robot link. We can also provide the dynamic properties of the link, such as the inertial matrix and the collision properties.

The syntax is as follows:

<link name="<name of the link>"> 
<inertial>...........</inertial>...