SRDF

The SRDF or Semantic Robot Description Format complement the URDF and specifies joint groups, default robot configurations, additional collision checking information, and additional transforms that may be needed to completely specify the robot's pose. The recommended way to generate a SRDF is using the MoveIt! Setup Assistant.

Virtual Joints
The URDF contains information only about the physical joints on the robot. Often, additional joints need to be defined to specify the pose of the root link on the robot with respect to a world coordinate system. In such cases, a virtual joint is used to specify this connection. E.g., a mobile robot like the PR2 that moves around in the plane is specified using a planar virtual joint that attaches the world coordinate frame to the frame of the robot. A fixed robot (like an industrial manipulator) should be attached to the world using a fixed joint.

Passive Joints
Passive joints are unactuated joints on a robot, e.g. passive casters on a differential drive robots. They are specified separately in the SRDF to make sure that different components in the motion planning or control pipelines know that the joints cannot be directly controlled. If your robot has unactuated casters, they should be specified as passive casters.

Groups
a 'Group' (sometimes called 'JointGroup' or 'Planning Group') is a central concept in MoveIt! MoveIt! always acts on a particular group. MoveIt! will only consider moving the joints in the group that it is planning for -- other joints are left stationary. (A motion plan where all joints in the robot may move can be achieved by creating a group containing all joints.) A group is simply a collection of joints and links. Each group can be specified in one of several different ways:

Collection of Joints
A group can be specified as a collection of joints. All the child links of each joint are automatically included in the group.

Collection of Links
A group can also be specified as a collection of links. All the parent joints of the links are also included in the group.

Serial Chain
A serial chain is specified using the base link and the tip link. The tip link in a chain is the child link of the last joint in the chain. The base link in a chain is the parent link for the first joint in the chain.

Collection of Sub-groups
A group can also be a collection of groups. E.g., you can define the left_arm and right_arm as two groups and then define a new group called both_arms that includes these two groups.

End-Effectors
Certain groups in a robot can be given a special designation as an end-effector. An end-effector is typically connected to another group (like an arm) through a fixed joint. Note that when specifying groups that are end-effectors, its important to make sure that there are no common links between the end-effector and the parent group it is connected to.

Self-Collisions
The Default Self-Collision Matrix Generator (part of Setup Assistant) searches for pairs of links on the robot that can safely be disabled from collision checking, decreasing motion planning processing time. These pairs of links are disabled when they are always in collision, never in collision, in collision in the robot's default position or when the links are adjacent to each other on the kinematic chain. The sampling density specifies how many random robot positions to check for self collision. Higher densities require more computation time while lower densities have a higher possibility of disabling pairs that should not be disabled. The default value is 10,000 collision checks. Collision checking is done in parallel to decrease processing time.

Robot Poses
The SRDF can also store fixed configurations of the robot. A typical example of the URDF in this case is in defining a HOME position for a manipulator. The configuration is stored with a string id, which can be used to recover the configuration later.

SRDF Documentation
For information about the syntax for the SRDF, read more details on the ROS SRDF Wiki page.

Links

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