Docs? about urdfdom

[davetcoleman]

Something better than http://docs.ros.org/api/urdf/html/?

Now that its outside of bloom we'd have to setup our own doxygen generator, right?

This is prob obvious, but you can get the same thing by just looking in the code header files right?

[rhaschke]

More docs on the API would be great definitely. Also some tutorials on how to use (and extend) the parser APIs would be great!
@thomas-moulard: For example, is it possible to extend urdf_parser_py to parse own URDF tags? If so, can you point out examples?

[rhaschke]

@thomas-moulard: Is it possible to ignore unknown tags in urdf_parser_py?
For gazebo tags, this is explicitly stated by xmlr.AggregateElement('gazebo', xmlr.RawType()).
However, URDF can be extended arbitrarily (not only with gazebo tags), can't it?

[kavonszadkowski]

As far as I understand, URDF could be extended arbitrarily as it's only XML, after all, but it's not intended to be freely extendable.
We faced the same problem a while ago and decided to annotate it rather than changing the URDF parser itself. You can check out our (not yet finalized) solution here.

[FSund]

I was looking for a quick example of how to parse an URDF using urdfdom yesterday, and was unable to find anything anywhere.

• The ROS Wiki page on urdf has nothing
• The ROS Tutorial/urdf/Parse a URDF file is using the deprecated urdf package
• The ROS Wiki page on urdfdom is EOL
• This repo contains something of an example if you find your way to check_urdf.cpp or the unit tests

Even something as simple as the following would have been of great help

#include <urdf_parser/urdf_parser.h>

std::string xml;
nh.getParam("robot_description", xml);
urdf::ModelInterfaceSharedPtr urdf = urdf::parseURDF(xml);

I would like to help, but I am not sure where and how I should go about it. An example in the urdfdom README is the first thing that comes to mind. Perhaps the ROS Tutorial on URDF should also be updated. Does anyone have any preference?