Understanding robot modeling using xacro

In this section, we will discuss xacro, XML macros which define the URDF files in a compact form and makes their readability and maintainability easier. Moreover, this new format allows us to develop the robot model in a modular structure, which can be reused in complex design.

Getting ready

Once again, we are going to build a mobile robot with four wheels and an arm robot with a gripper, like we discussed in the previous section, using xacro instead of the URDF file format. Moreover, we can create each example program in the ROS package in our workspace individually or copy them from the chapter6_tutorials packages in GitHub, which are arm_robot.xacro and mobile_robot.xacro, respectively...