Introduction to URDF¶

In this exercise, we will explore how to describe a robot in the URDF format.

Motivation¶

Many of the coolest and most useful capabilities of ROS and its community involve things like collision checking and dynamic path planning. It’s frequently useful to have a code-independent, human-readable way to describe the geometry of robots and their cells. Think of it like a textual CAD description: “part-one is 1 meter left of part-two and has the following triangle-mesh for display purposes.” The Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) is the most popular of these formats today. This module will walk you through creating a simple robot cell that we’ll expand upon and use for practical purposes later.

Reference Example¶

Building a Visual Robot Model with URDF from Scratch

Further Information and Resources¶

Scan-N-Plan Application: Problem Statement¶

We have the software skeleton of our Scan-N-Plan application, so let’s take the next step and add some physical context. The geometry we describe in this exercise will be used to:

Perform collision checking
Understand robot kinematics
Perform transformation math Your goal is to describe a workcell that features:
An origin frame called world
A separate frame with “table” geometry (a flat rectangular prism)
A frame (geometry optional) called camera_frame that is oriented such that its Z axis is aligned with the X axis of world

Scan-N-Plan Application: Guidance¶

It’s customary to put describing files that aren’t code into their own “support” package. URDFs typically go into their own subfolder ''urdf/''. See the abb_irb2400_support package. Add a urdf sub-folder to your application support package.
Create a new workcell.urdf file inside the myworkcell_support/urdf/ folder and insert the following XML skeleton:
```
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<robot name="myworkcell" xmlns:xacro="http://ros.org/wiki/xacro">
</robot>
```

Add the required links. See the irb2400_macro.xacro example from an ABB2400.

Add the world frame as a "virtual link" (no geometry).
```
<link name="world"/>
```

Add the table frame, and be sure to specify both collision & visual geometry tags. See the box type in the XML specification.

<link name="table">
  <visual>
    <geometry>
      <box size="1.0 1.0 0.05"/>
    </geometry>
  </visual>
  <collision>
    <geometry>
      <box size="1.0 1.0 0.05"/>
    </geometry>
  </collision>
</link>

Add the camera_frame frame as another virtual link (no geometry).
```
<link name="camera_frame"/>
```

Connect your links with a pair of fixed joints Use an rpy tag in the world_to_camera joint to set its orientation as described in the introduction.

<joint name="world_to_table" type="fixed">
  <parent link="world"/>
  <child link="table"/>
  <origin xyz="0 0 0.5" rpy="0 0 0"/>
</joint>

<joint name="world_to_camera" type="fixed">
  <parent link="world"/>
  <child link="camera_frame"/> 
  <origin xyz="-0.25 -0.5 1.25" rpy="0 3.14159 0"/>
</joint>

It helps to visualize your URDF as you add links, to verify things look as expected:
```
roslaunch urdf_tutorial display.launch model:=<RELATIVE_PATH_TO_URDF>
```

If nothing shows up in Rviz, you may need to change the base frame in RVIZ (left panel at top) to the name of one of the links in your model.

Open Source Feedback

See something that needs improvement? Please open a pull request on this GitHub page