Summary

In this chapter, we mainly looked at the importance of robot modeling and how we can model a robot in ROS. We talked more about the robot_model meta package and the packages inside robot_model, such as urdf, xacro, and joint_state_publisher. We discussed URDF, xacro, and the main URDF tags that we are going to use. We also created a sample model in URDF and xacro and discussed the difference between the two. After that, we created a complex robotic manipulator with seven DOF and looked at the usage of the joint state publisher and robot state publisher packages. Towards the end of the chapter, we reviewed the designing procedure of a differential drive mobile robot using xacro. In the next chapter, we will look at the simulation of these robots using Gazebo.