Understanding robot modeling using URDF

In the previous section, we listed some important packages that use the urdf file format. In this section, we will take a further look at the URDF XML tags, which help to model the robot. We need to create a file and write the relationship between each link and joint in the robot and save the file using the .urdf extension.

URDF can represent the kinematic and dynamic description of the robot, the 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 the single link of a robot. Using this tag, we can model a robot link and its properties. The modeling includes the size, the shape, and the color; it can even import a 3D mesh to represent the robot link. We can also provide the dynamic properties of the link, such as the inertial matrix and the collision properties.

  The syntax is as follows:

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