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 robot models:

• robot_model: ROS has a meta package called robot_model, which contains important packages that help build the 3D robot models. We can see all the important packages inside this meta-package:

  • urdf: One of the important packages inside the robot_model meta package is urdf. The URDF package contains a C++ parser for the Unified Robot Description Format (URDF), which is an XML file to represent a robot model.

• We can define a robot model, sensors, and a working environment using URDF and can parse it using URDF parsers. We can only describe a robot in URDF that has a tree-like structure in its links, that is, the robot will have rigid links and will be connected using joints. Flexible links can't be represented using URDF. The URDF is composed using special XML tags and we can...