CAD to URDF

Overview

The goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to export Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) data from Autodesk Fusion CAD software for medical robotics research.

CAD software is commonly used to design mechanical hardware for robotic systems. Many CAD software packages, including Autodesk Fusion, allow for the definition of joints and the simulation of their kinematics on the software before fabricating an actual device. It would be convenient and save the prototyping lead time if both visual and kinematic models of the mechanical hardware could be shared with the downstream processes in the prototyping workflow, including forward/inverse kinematics, motion planning, control, treatment planning, and dynamic simulation.

In the Robot Operating System (ROS), the URDF is the standard data format for describing a robot model, and defining a model using the URDF would be the first step in performing the aforementioned prototyping workflow in the ROS environment. Additionally, the same robot model can be imported into a medical image computing platform, 3D Slicer, for image-guided surgical planning using the SlicerROS2 plug-in. This tutorial outlines the process of exporting a CAD model in the URDF and using it in ROS and Slicer.