What is URDF used for?

URDF, or Unified Robotics Description Format, is an XML specification used in academia and industry to model multibody systems such as robotic manipulator arms for manufacturing assembly lines and animatronic robots for amusement parks.

What is a link URDF?

element The link element describes a rigid body with an inertia, visual features, and collision properties.

What is Ros URDF?

The Unified Robotic Description Format (URDF) is an XML file format used in ROS to describe all elements of a robot. To use a URDF file in Gazebo, some additional simulation-specific tags must be added to work properly with Gazebo.

What is Xacro file?

Xacro is an XML macro language. With xacro, you can construct shorter and more readable XML files by using macros that expand to larger XML expressions.

What is the difference between URDF and SDF?

My understanding can be boiled down to this: URDF specifies a robot, but SDF also specifies a world for the robot to live in, which is a much larger set of things. Based on this premise, SDF is designed to represent a superset of everything that can be represented in URDF.

What is URDF and Xacro?

Xacro is just another way of defining a URDF, not an alternative to it. It makes certain things easier, for instance you can generate a “wheel” macro and instantiate that 6 times with different parameters to put 6 wheels on your robot, as opposed to copying and pasting the same code six times manually.

How do I load a URDF in gazebo?

Nonfunctional Gazebo Interface

  1. Loads the urdf from the macro tutorial into the parameter description (as before)
  2. Launches an empty gazebo world.
  3. Runs the script to read the urdf from the parameter and spawn it in gazebo.
  4. By default, the gazebo gui will also be displayed, and look like this:

How do I load a URDF in Gazebo?

How do you write URDF?

Learning URDF (including C++ API)

  1. Create your own urdf file. In this tutorial you start creating your own urdf robot description file.
  2. Parse a urdf file. This tutorial teaches you how to use the urdf parser.
  3. Using the robot state publisher on your own robot.
  4. Start using the KDL parser.
  5. Using urdf with robot_state_publisher.

What is xmlns Xacro?

Comments. This is basically the answer. xmlns is short for “XML NameSpace”, and is a special XML construct that is expained in the links @VictorLamoine posted. @ shawnysh: you can essentially consider them like import statements in the example you posted. But it’s really an XML thing, not ROS specific.

What is SDF format gazebo?

SDFormat (Simulation Description Format), sometimes abbreviated as SDF, is an XML format that describes objects and environments for robot simulators, visualization, and control. Originally developed as part of the Gazebo robot simulator, SDFormat was designed with scientific robot applications in mind.

What is URDF Gazebo?