urdf-editor

Text editor for viewing and modifying URDF models.

Ideas

Problems

• Xacro does not simply map to a URDF file so it may be difficult to enable editing a Xacro file visually. It would all be editing the file then seeing results.
• If xacro data were mapped to the resulting joint configurations or generated parameters then at least you might be able to click on a joint and see what was used to generate the values associated with it and edit those causing ripple effects onto other models.

Web-based editor

• Drag and drop mechanism for adding URDF files, models.
• Re-instantiate URDF model on change of the text editor.
• Provide tree view for editing joint, link, and geometry positions.
• Begin with full model hierarchy and select which objects / frames should be joints.
• if just a position or numeric value changes then do a minimal change to the model instead of reparsing.
• allow custom sorting of joints and links in the xml doc.
• couple there links and associated joints in the displayed hierarchy.
• display joint limits on hover of a joint.
• display rotation axes on hover
• allow drag positioning of individual visual, link, or joint elements.
• toggle for displaying collision or visual elements
• display the workspace volume of a kinematic chain in 3d.
• node editor for editing individual attributes of a link / joint.
• allow joint manipulation / dragging to get a sense for movement possibilities.
• jump scroll to synchronize the hierarchy view and text view on click. And / or highlight the section on hover or focus.

Electron editor

• Allow for editing xacro files if ros is on the system path to generate the urdf file while editing.
• Edit multiple xacro files at once.
• Use ros to find meshes and get package directories