Working group to discuss robot and world representation in ROS, Robot Raconteur, and industrial applications.
The creation of this working group is motivated by the need for a more capable robot description file format for the Open Source Teach Pendant (renamed PyRI), ROS-I Tesseract, and Robot Raconteur projects currently under development. The current URDF and SDF formats do not adequately meet the needs of these projects. Custom extensions have been introduced to the existing file formats to overcome the current limitations, but these changes are leading to incompatibility between software packages. This working group is being created in the hope that the file formats designed for the motivating projects can be utilized by the wider community.
This working group is intended to create file formats for use with the Open Source Teach Pendant (PyRI), ROS-I Tesseract, and Robot Raconteur projects. The developed file formats will be designed with the expectation that they will become a proposal for a univeral format for ROS, RR, research, and industrial applications. Input from the wider community is being accepted towards this goal.
For the initial file format development, input will be accepted from the community, but final decisions will be made by Southwest Research Institute, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Wason Technology, LLC. Once the initial work is complete, a formal technical standards working group open to all interested parties will be established to finalize the standard.
Initial file format proposal: 9/30/20