Urdf-viz: URDF file viewer

[OTL]

Hi, ROS Users!

I released urdf-viz, URDF viewer.

OTL/urdf-viz

How do you check your URDF files?
launch rviz? Isn’t heavy?

urdf-viz is offline, single binary to visualize urdf file.
It supports not only moving each joint, but moving arms using inverse kinematics.
All mesh types are supported.

See some images

I’m happy if you try urdf-viz and tell me some issues on github.
I know the GUI interface is not good enough, but it will take more time to fix it.

Because urdf-viz is written in rust-lang, it is not installed by
apt-get install ros-*.
Please read README.md to try.

I think Rust is suitable language for robotics, and started some projects for robotics.
urdf-viz is one of them.

I already wrote kinematics, urdf loader, visualizer, and rrt in Rust.

[Rick_Armstrong]

Hi,

Any chance you could post some known-working URDF examples to the repo? urdf-viz is crashing on our URDF, but It’s pretty likely we have errors. It’d be nice to verify that urdf-viz is working as expected on known-good files.

Thanks,
Rick

P.S. Neat idea for a much-needed tool!

[OTL]

Thank you for trying.

I want to try your URDF to check urdf-viz.

I tried almost all *_descrpition packages on Ubuntu16.04, kinetic.
for example,

• pr2_description/
• pepper_description/
• nao_description/
• nextage_description/

and other projects…

but I think this is not enough. (kinetic has less packages than indigo.)

If you can publish your model, or give me your description package to me, I can help you.

urdf-viz failed to show thormang3 model which was released for kinetic.
Below change shows why it failed.

https://github.com/ROBOTIS-GIT/ROBOTIS-THORMANG-Common/commit/238f5622f08fc12146d2a7693a2f6e0d3710c1de

The crate which is used to parse URDF, which is urdf-rs, is stricter than normal ROS urdf parse programs (and it is difficult to debug).
It does not allow multiple elements which should be only one.