Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming

Creating the COLLADA file of a robot to work with OpenRave

In this section, we can discuss how to convert the robot URDF model to the collada file (.dae) format to work with OpenRave. There is a ROS package called collada_urdf, which contains nodes to convert URDF into collada files. The URDF file of ABB-IRB 6640 model is on abb_irb6600_support/urdf folder named irb6640.urdf. Copy this file into your working folder and run the following command for the conversion:

Start roscore
$ roscore

Run the conversion command. We need to mention the URDF file and the output DAE file:

$ rosrun collada_urdf urdf_to_collada irb6640.urdf irb6640.dae

Tip

In most of the cases, this command fails because most of the URDF file contains STL meshes and it may not convert ...