Hello Aaron, I saw this post was written about two years ago. Were you able to arrive at a solution?

Thanks so much Erick

Hi Aaron,

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 6:52 PM, Aaron O'Toole <airuno2L [..] ...>
<airuno2l [..] ...> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I'm just starting out with using KDL and am looking for some advise.
> It's probably better if I describe what I'm trying to do first.
>
> I'm going to be using KDL's inverse kinematics solver for an
> application that uses different robot arms. The computer that controls
> the arm will not have ROS on it. I want developers to be able to use
> their URDF models of their robot arms with my application...without
> building the KDL::chain by hand.
>
> So far I can think of two possiblilties...but I'm not sure if either
> is feasible.
>
> Option 1: Use kdl_parser without ROS on my robot computer. This way
> the parser can read the URDF file on start up. Problem is, I'm not
> sure how hard it would be to set up kdl_parser to be used without ROS
> (I would want to use cmake).

Which parts of ROS would you not want to use?

> Option 2: I don't know if this is possible, but if there is some file
> format that I am unaware of that saves a KDL::chain, I could have
> people uses the kdl_parser on a ROS machine, then save the KDL::chain
> file, and transfer it to the robot computer. Like I said, I don't know
> if this is possible.
>
> Any ideas or suggestions?

After looking at the kdl_parser the only (recursive) dependency on a
part of the ROS core is the roscpp library (also taking into account
urdf, urdf_parser, collada_parser and others), of which only the ROS
console messages (ROS_INFO,ROS_WARNING, etc) are used. So technically
speaking it shoul not be too hard to build kdl_parser and its
dependencies without ROS, if you can find out how to do it without the
ROS buildsystem, if you're lucky part of them are already catkinized.

Ruben

> Thanks,
> Aaron
> --
> Orocos-Users mailing list
> Orocos-Users [..] ...
> http://lists.mech.kuleuven.be/mailman/listinfo/orocos-users

On 11/20/2012 06:52 PM, Aaron O'Toole <airuno2L [..] ...> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I'm just starting out with using KDL and am looking for some advise.
> It's probably better if I describe what I'm trying to do first.
>
> I'm going to be using KDL's inverse kinematics solver for an
> application that uses different robot arms. The computer that controls
> the arm will not have ROS on it. I want developers to be able to use
> their URDF models of their robot arms with my application...without
> building the KDL::chain by hand.
>
> So far I can think of two possiblilties...but I'm not sure if either
> is feasible.
>
> Option 1: Use kdl_parser without ROS on my robot computer. This way
> the parser can read the URDF file on start up. Problem is, I'm not
> sure how hard it would be to set up kdl_parser to be used without ROS
> (I would want to use cmake).
>
> Option 2: I don't know if this is possible, but if there is some file
> format that I am unaware of that saves a KDL::chain, I could have
> people uses the kdl_parser on a ROS machine, then save the KDL::chain
> file, and transfer it to the robot computer. Like I said, I don't know
> if this is possible.
if it is in the kdl typekit, it can be written to a property file (xml format) and afterwards loaded (marshalling)

>
> Any ideas or suggestions?
>
> Thanks,
> Aaron
>