pykdl_utils about urdfdom

[sloretz]

Looks like it's been a while since this was updated. @kphawkins I think the kdl_parser repo would be a great place to integrate pykdl_utils.

I'll close this issue, but feel free to reopen.

[goretkin]

+1, I think this is very important functionality that has been available for C++ nodes under http://wiki.ros.org/pr2_mechanism_model#Chain but has been easily available in Python (see post from 2010: http://lists.willowgarage.com/pipermail/pr2-users/2010-July/000970.html)

[jacquelinekay]

Funny enough, @jbohren contributed something similar to this in ros/robot_model#74, and I did a bit of reshuffling to put it in its own ROS package, kdl_parser_py.

I was just thinking though that it's a bit odd that kdl_parser and the upcoming kdl_parser_py aren't dependent of ROS, however, since in their most distilled form they would only depend on urdfdom. Right now they depend on it indirectly through their dependency on the urdf ROS package.