ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Adding physical and collision properties to a URDF model

Before simulating a robot in a robot simulator, such as Gazebo, V-REP, and so on, we need to define the robot link's physical properties such as geometry, color, mass, and inertia, and the collision properties of the link.

We will only get good simulation results if we define all these properties inside the robot model. URDF provides tags to include all these parameters and code snippets of base_link contained in theses properties as given here:

<link> ...... <collision> <geometry> <cylinder length="0.03" radius="0.2"/> </geometry> <origin rpy="0 0 0" xyz="0 0 0"/> </collision> <inertial> <mass value="1"/> <inertia ixx="1.0" ixy="0.0" ixz="0.0" iyy="1.0" ...