displaying COLLADA 1.4 models in rviz

Question

Thanks Ryohei (and Rosen) for your suggestions - after re-compiling rviz/robot_model from trunk, I was able to see the Barrett hand COLLADA model in rviz.

Then I had our summer intern work furiously to make a COLLADA model of our robot, using Blender. But it seems to only export COLLADA 1.4, and rviz/robot_model seems to only accept COLLADA 1.5.

Any advice on how to use my COLLADA 1.4 model in rviz/robot_model, or an export sequence that will get me from Blender to COLLADA 1.5?

Thanks! -Nick

PS - I would attach the model itself, but I can't due to propriety of information...

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ryohei Ueda

Hi Nick

have you (re-)compiled rviz with the trunk robot_model stack?

-- ryohei

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 10:48 PM, Armstrong-Crews, Nicholas - 0447 - MITLL [email protected]> wrote: Has anybody done this successfully? It’s giving me trouble…

I’m following this tutorial: http://www.ros.org/wiki/collada_urdf/Tutorials/Working%20Directly%20wi th%20COLLADA

I get the output:

WARNING: unrecognized tag sphinxdoc

…

process[collada_joint_publisher]: started

process[rviz]: started

[ERROR]: No name given for the robot

[ERROR]: No name given for the robot

The model loads fine in the adjacent OpenRAVE 0.4.0 window, but rviz gives me the status error: “URDF failed Model parse”.

I’m using ROS diamondback binaries with jsk-ros-pkg. I’ve tried with both the diamondback release version of robot_model, and the 1.5.1 release from the trunk (as downloaded by jsk_ros_patch). I’ve also tried with one of the stock models from the collada_robots package.

Any bright ideas?

Thanks! -Nick

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Originally posted by Nick Armstrong-Crews on ROS Answers with karma: 481 on 2011-07-25

Post score: 2

Answer 1

Hi Nick,

Rosen suggested to me that after exporting your model from Blender, edit the .dae file and change the Collada specification line to:

<COLLADA version="1.5.0" xmlns="http://www.collada.org/2008/03/COLLADASchema"> 

The problem I then ran into is that the Collada model turns out to be single mesh so that the individual joints are not articulated as they would be in a URDF/Xacro model. Rosen then pointed me toward the OpenGrasp project that has a Blender plugin for creating the correct kinematic chain for use with ROS and OpenRAVE. However, the plugin was designed for Blender 2.48a and Python 2.5 and so you would need to use those versions to give it a try. (After 2 full days of trying to get all this to work, I've run out of steam for now...)

--patrick

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Originally posted by Pi Robot with karma: 4046 on 2011-07-25

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2

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Original comments

Comment by phil0stine on 2012-08-18:
Hi, I read the thread you are referring to. I know it's been awhile, but did you have any luck importing collada files with kinematic chains? Thanks