Possible symbiosis with xacro part DB feature

[guru-florida]

This is a request for discussion. I saw your lightning video (Day 1, @36:45) at Roscon2023. URDFs are such a big hurdle for new ROS users so I think your project is a very valuable addition if it helps ease this barrier to entry.

I am also working on a different approach to ease the URDF design barrier. I didn't feel I had the time cycles to complete a visual CAD solution but I felt with a few minor feature additions to the Xacro tool I could create a way for ROS packages to contain a collection of reusable parts. These parts would contain the meshes, collision, inertial and optional "attachment points" already defined. Assembly of a URDF could then be much simpler by attaching these parts together like Lego and linking by their attachment points. Parts are implemented as xacro macros. More details are explained in this Xacro issue post.

I feel like our goals could work together. A few things off the top of my head:

• Possibly freecad.cross could read meta information in the Parts like the attachment points and offer the user an easy way to attach a new part. (attachment point is basically a saved Pose)
• It could scan the sourced ROS packages for contained "Parts" (i.e. Part DBs)
• Provide a toolbox of the available parts from the scanned packages to drag and drop into the assembly

I have the features completed for Xacro but I haven't done a PR yet. I am in the process of developing a few example PartDB packages. I am open to feedback on my approach and any improvements or ways to integrate with freecad.cross, such as providing more meta in the xacro output if a "freecad.cross" parameter is given.

[galou]

Hi @guru-florida thanks for engaging the conversation. Please let me some time to try out the xacro part DB feature and I'll tell you what I think about symbiosis.

I warn you already now, that it'll be difficult for me to do anything big for capacity reason. CROSS is a one-man project for now and I have a lot of work to make the workbench more robust and user-friendly.