Introducing Kinematics with Robot Operating System (ROS)

Abstract

The study of Kinematics is essential to Robotics. A robot, to perform most applications needs to process positional data and transform data from one frame of reference to another. Robots have sensors, links and actuators each with its own frame of reference, so transformations between reference frames can be quite tedious. Traditionally Kinematics for robots is introduced to students with MatLab and the Robotic Toolbox. In this paper we examine the introduction of Kinematics for robotics with the features and tools available in the open source Robot Operating System (ROS). ROS implements tools for Kinematics transforms (tf) as a key part of the ROS Core Libraries. ROS defines robots with the Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) standard based upon Extensible Markup Language (XML). URDF is in many respects similar to Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) Convention, but with significant additional enhancements.