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 and model a robot:

• urdf: The most important ROS package to model a robot is the urdf package. This package contains a C++ parser for the URDF, which is an XML file representing a robot model. Other different components make up urdf, such as the following:

  a. urdf_parser_plugin: This package implements methods to fill the URDF data structures.

  b. urdfdom_headers: This component provides core data structure headers to use the urdf parser.

  c. collada_parser: This package populates data structures by parsing a Collada file.

  d. urdfdom: This component populates data structures by parsing URDF files.

We can define robot models, sensors, and a working environment using URDF. We can also parse them using URDF parsers. We can only describe a robot in URDF that has a tree-like...