Understanding URDF with MATLAB

The Universal Robot Data Format (URDF) is an increasingly common way to represent the kinematic structure and visual appearance of robots. It is widely used in the ROS software ecosystem. A URDF file is an XML format file and a number of specialized tags.

I’ve not found a particularly helpful or readable tutorial hence I wrote my own. We start with an introduction to XML and then progressively introduce URDF: kinematics, visual appearance and finally kinematics and appearance.

Example XML, URDF and MATLAB LiveScripts are also provided.

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