Release 0.7 available at Github. Now with ROS URDF support!

Release 0.7 available at Github. Now with ROS URDF support!

Good news everyone!

With version 0.7 the GPU Voxels lib can finally load URDF files! URDF stands for “Unified Robot Description Format” and is the common standard in ROS to describe robot’s kinematic structure and link geometries. The URDF parser of GPU-Voxels swaps mesh-files for pointcloud-files when loading a description. Also it builds up a kinematic tree with the help of Orocos KDL (this part is done in ROS via the TF tree). So now a ROS joint-message interface is pretty easy to implement and will be part of an upcoming example program. Have a look at the urdf-loader example to see how to interact with the new robot type. If you want to load your own robot, you will have to supply pointcloud representations of all links. These can be generated from meshes with Patrick Min’s great “binvox” tool. I will post a how-to on this site soon. I am sure this makes GPU-Voxels a lot more interesting, as most robots already feature an URDF model.

Best, Andreas

The changelog for 0.7 says:

V 0.7 (2015-06-10):
===================
- Added URDF parser and interfaces to load ROS robots.
- Added URDF example program with HoLLiE robot model and URDF file.
- Unified API for DH-Parameter and URDF robots.
- Added name lookup to MetaPointClouds.
- Restructured CMake files to generate more descriptive report about missing libs.
- Fixed missing thrust include.
- Fixed color gradient in visualizer.
- Fixed DH transformations for prismatic links.