URDF is a simple XML format for defining kinematic properties of robotic systems. It is error prone and time consuming to create for complex systems 1. To overcome these challenges, we leverage the advantages of Model-Driven Engineering techniques to develop an integrated development tooling for kinematics modeling.
At the core of this effort is an Ecore meta-model (original source: urdf.xsd), which describes a kinematic model. Along with this Ecore model, we develop a set of plugins to introduce a language grammar based on Eclipse Xtext and Xtend. This grammar facilitates developing integrated development tools that allows creating kinematic models from scratch and composing those models. The models are then validated (e.g. kinematic tree validation) and a ROS package can be auto-generated for the composed description files.
kinematics-model-parser: parses a URDF file using the API from xacro. It then generates a kinematics DSL file.
vscode-kinematics-model: Text editor for the kinematics DSL defined in this repository
kinematics-glsp: Graphical editor for kinematics model defined in this repository.
Footnotes
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Understanding Xacro Misunderstandings https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.09694.pdf ↩