urdf_viz

Visualize URDF(Unified Robot Description Format) file. urdf_viz is written by rust-lang.

Install

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

$ cargo install urdf_viz

Install mesh converter commands (optional)

$ sudo apt-get install meshlab assimp-utils

If you don't want to install rust and cargo, you might be able to find binary for Ubuntu16.04 64bit here.

Command line

urdf_viewer command will be installed by cargo. It needs rosrun, rospack to resolve package:// in <mesh>, and it uses xacro to convert .xacro file. It means you need $ source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash before using urdf_viewer.

$ urdf_viewer URDF_FILE.urdf

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

$ urdf_viewer XACRO_FILE.urdf.xacro

The default mesh converter is assimp. Sometimes it fails to create currect meshes. (for example, nao, pepper models fails)

If you failed to convert mesh files, try -m option to use meshlabserver.

$ urdf_viewer -m URDF_FILE.urdf

For other commands, please read -h option.

$ urdf_viewer -h

GUI

In the GUI, you can

• Move a joint
  • set the angle of a joint by Up/Down key
  • Ctrl + Drag to move the angle of a joint
  • change the joint to be moved by [ and ]
• Inverse kinematics (only positions)
  • Shift + Drag to use inverse kinematics(Y and Z axis)
  • Shift + Ctrl + Drag to use inverse kinematics(X and Z axis)
  • change the move target for inverse kinematics by , and .
• r key to set random joints
• Move view point
  • Mouse Right Drag to translate view camera position
  • Mouse Left Drag to look around
  • Scroll to zoom in/out

Garally

Dependencies

urdf-viz is strongly depend on kiss3d, which is super easy to use, great 3D graphic engine.