Chapter 2. Working with 3D Robot Modeling in ROS

The first phase of robot manufacturing is its design and modeling. We can design and model the robot using CAD tools such as AutoCAD, Solid Works, Blender, and so on. One of the main purposes of modeling robot is simulation.

The robotic simulation tool can check the critical flaws in the robot design and can confirm the working of the robot before it goes to the manufacturing phase.

The virtual robot model must have all the characteristics of real hardware, the shape of robot may or may not look like the actual robot but it must be an abstract, which has all the physical characteristics of the actual robot.

In this chapter, we are going to discuss the designing of two robots. One is a seven DOF ( Degrees of Freedom) manipulator and the other is a differential drive robot. In the upcoming chapters, we can see its simulation and how to build the real hardware and finally, it's interfacing to ROS.

If we are planning to create the 3D model of the robot and simulate using ROS, you need to learn about some ROS packages which helps in robot designing. ROS has a standard meta package for designing, and creating robot models called robot_model, which consists of a set of packages called urdf, kdl_parser, robot_state_publisher, collada_urdf, and so on. These packages help us create the 3D robot model description with the exact characteristics of the real hardware.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• ROS packages for robot modeling
• Understanding robot modeling using URDF
• Creating the ROS package for the robot description
• Creating our first URDF model
• Explaining the URDF code
• Understanding robot modeling using xacro
• Creating our first Xacro model
• Explanation first Xacro model
• Conversion of xacro to URDF
• Creating a robot description for a seven DOF robot manipulator
• Working with the joint state publisher and robot state publisher
• Creating Robot description for a differential wheeled robot