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urdf-viz

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Visualize URDF(Unified Robot Description Format) file. urdf-viz is written in Rust-lang.

Install

Install with cargo

If you are using rust-lang already and cargo is installed, you can install by cargo install.

cargo install urdf-viz

If you want to use mesh other than .obj, .stl, and .dae files, you need to install with assimp like below.

cargo install urdf-viz --features assimp

Pre-requirements for build

Common

If you want to use --features assimp to use mesh other than .obj, .stl, and .dae files, you need cmake.

On Linux

If you have not installed ROS, you may need cmake, xorg-dev, glu to compile assimp-sys and glfw-sys.

sudo apt-get install cmake xorg-dev libglu1-mesa-dev

Download binary

You can download prebuilt binaries from the release page. Prebuilt binaries are available for macOS, Linux, and Windows (static executable).

Install via Homebrew

You can install urdf-viz using Homebrew tap on macOS and Linux:

brew install openrr/tap/urdf-viz

How to use

urdf-viz command will be installed. It needs rosrun and rospack to resolve package:// in <mesh> tag, and it uses xacro to convert .xacro file into urdf file. It means you need $ source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash or something before using urdf-viz.

urdf-viz URDF_FILE.urdf

It is possible to use xacro file directly. It will be converted by rosrun xacro xacro inside of urdf-viz.

urdf-viz XACRO_FILE.urdf.xacro

If your xacro file has some arguments, you can pass them by --xacro-args option.

urdf-viz XACRO_FILE.urdf.xacro --xacro-args arg1=value arg2=value

For other options, please read the output of -h option.

urdf-viz -h

If there are no "package://" in mesh tag, and don't use xacro you can skip install of ROS.

If there are "package://" in mesh tag, but path or URL to package is known and don't use xacro you can also skip install of ROS by replacing package with path or URL.

GUI Usage

In the GUI, you can do some operations with keyboard and mouse.

Web I/O interface

You can set/get the joint angles using http/JSON. Default port number is 7777. You can change it by -p option. (jq is used for JSON formatter in the following examples)

Set joint angles

POST the JSON data, which format is like below. You have to specify the names of joints and positions (angles). The length of names and positions have to be the same. You don't need write all joint names, it means you can specify a part of the joints.

{
  "names": ["joint_name1", "joint_name2"],
  "positions": [0.5, -0.1]
}

You can try it using curl.

$ curl -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"names": ["r_shoulder_yaw", "r_shoulder_pitch"], "positions": [0.8, -0.8]}' http://127.0.0.1:7777/set_joint_positions | jq
{
  "is_ok": true,
  "reason": ""
}

Get joint angles as JSON

The result JSON format of getting the joint angles is the same as the Set method.

$ curl http://127.0.0.1:7777/get_joint_positions | jq
{
  "names": [
    "r_shoulder_yaw",
    "r_shoulder_pitch",
    "r_shoulder_roll",
    "r_elbow_pitch",
    "r_wrist_yaw",
    "r_wrist_pitch",
    "l_shoulder_yaw",
    "l_shoulder_pitch",
    "l_shoulder_roll",
    "l_elbow_pitch",
    "l_wrist_yaw",
    "l_wrist_pitch"
  ],
  "positions": [
    0.8,
    -0.8,
    -1.3447506,
    -1.6683152,
    -1.786362,
    -1.0689334,
    0.11638665,
    -0.5987091,
    0.7868867,
    -0.027412653,
    0.019940138,
    -0.6975361
  ]
}

Set Robot Origin

$ curl -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"position":[0.2,0.0,0.0],"quaternion":[0.0,0.0,0.0,1.0]}' http://127.0.0.1:7777/set_robot_origin
{"is_ok":true,"reason":""}

The order of the quaternion elements is w, i, j, k.

Get Robot Origin

$ curl http://127.0.0.1:7777/get_robot_origin
{"position":[0.2,0.0,0.0],"quaternion":[1.0,0.0,0.0,0.0]}

Get URDF Text

curl http://127.0.0.1:7777/get_urdf_text

Gallery

sawyer_1.png sawyer_2.png

nextage_1.png nextage_2.png

hsr_1.png hsr_2.png

ubr1_1.png ubr1_2.png

pepper_1.png pepper_2.png

pr2_1.png pr2_2.png

thormang3_1.png thormang3_2.png

Dependencies

OpenRR Community

Here is a discord server for OpenRR users and developers.