Summary

In this chapter, you discovered the full process of writing a URDF for a robot.

A URDF defines a robot model and contains two main things: links and joints. A link is a rigid part of a robot that does nothing on its own. A link can have a visual (simple shapes such as boxes, cylinders, spheres, or meshes exported from CAD software). You can see a robot as a collection of links put together. A joint defines the connection between two links. It specifies which link is the parent and which one is the child, as well as where the two links are connected, and how they move relative to each other.

You learned that what you write inside a joint will define a TF for the robot. In the end, with all the joints inside a URDF, you are creating a TF tree.

You also saw the complete process for adding a new link and joint on top of the previous ones. Make sure to follow this process every time. To help you develop and verify each step of the process, you learned that it’s a...