For about two years now I’ve worked (on-and-off) on a new REP attempting to standardise a small number of TF frames / links in .urdfs and .xacros of industrial robots. There are already REPs defining standard coordinate frames for mobile platforms and humanoid robots, but nothing for industrial robots so far.
Many robot models in repositories on the ros-industrial organisation already have some of these frames, and those were added based on their utility and the experiences of the authors of those models, but their addition has been ad-hoc and it made sense to capture the rationales for them in a single document so we can try to work towards standardising these frames across all repositories and robot models.
As this is a REP that deals with a topic in the context of industrial robots, I wanted to see whether a pre-review or RFC for this REP could work here in the ros-industrial category.
The REP in its current state can be found here: gavanderhoorn/rep/rep-0199.rst. A rendered version (for easier reading) is available here: gavanderhoorn.github.io/rep/rep-0199.html. For easier commenting and discussion, I’ve opened a draft PR (targeted at my own fork of ros-infrastructure/rep) here: gavanderhoorn/rep#3.
A previous review of this REP may be found here: gavanderhoorn/rep#2. Quite a few things have changed since then, but the comments on that PR might still be insightful.
I would appreciate any and all comments on the REP.
After this “internal” review, I plan to submit the REP to ros-infrastructure/rep in the second or third week of May.