Understanding robot modeling using URDF

We have discussed the urdf package. In this section, we will look further at 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.

The URDF can represent the kinematic and dynamic description of the robot, 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 size, shape, color, and can even import a 3D mesh to represent the robot link. We can also provide dynamic properties of the link such as inertial matrix and collision properties.

  The syntax is as follows:

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