ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Using properties

Using xacro, we can declare constants or properties that are the named values inside the xacro file, which can be used anywhere in the code. The main use of these constant definitions are, instead of giving hard coded values on links and joints, we can keep constants like this and it will be easier to change these values rather than finding the hard coded values and replacing them.

An example of using properties are given here. We declare the base link and pan link's length and radius. So, it will be easy to change the dimension here rather than changing values in each one:

 <xacro:property name="base_link_length" value="0.01" /> <xacro:property name="base_link_radius" value="0.2" /> <xacro:property name="pan_link_length" ...