ROS packages for robot modeling

ROS provides some good packages that can be used to build 3D robot models. In this section, we will discuss some of the important ROS packages that are commonly used to build and model a robot:

• urdf: The most important ROS package to model the robot is the urdf package. This package contains a C++ parser for the Unified Robot Description Format (URDF), which is an XML file representing a robot model. Other different components make up urdf:
  • urdf_parser_plugin: This package implements methods to fill URDF data structures
  • urdfdom_headers: This component provides core data structure headers to use the urdf parser
  • collada_parser: This package populates data structures by parsing a Collada file
  • urdfdom: This component populates data structures by parsing URDF files
  • collada-dom: This is a stand-alone component to convert Collada documents with 3D computer graphics software such as Maya, Blender, and Soft image

We can define a robot model, sensors, and a working environment...