Understanding Xacro Misunderstandings

The Xacro XML macro language can be used to augment the Universal Robot Description Format (URDF) and is part of a critical toolchain from geometric representations to simulation, visualization, and system execution. However, mem-bers of the robotics community, especially newcomers, struggle to trou...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) pp. 6247 - 6252
Main Authors: Albergo, Nicholas, Rathi, Vivek, Ore, John-Paul
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 23.05.2022
Subjects:
Education
Grounding
Meth-ods and Tools for Robot System Design
Operating systems
Pipelines
Software Tools for Robot Programming
Software-Hardware Integration for Robot Systems
Systematics
Visualization
XML
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Summary:The Xacro XML macro language can be used to augment the Universal Robot Description Format (URDF) and is part of a critical toolchain from geometric representations to simulation, visualization, and system execution. However, mem-bers of the robotics community, especially newcomers, struggle to troubleshoot and understand the interplay between systems and the Xacro preprocessing pipeline. To better understand how system developers struggle with Xacros, we manually examine 712 Xacro-related questions from the question and answer site answers.ros.org and find Xacro misunderstandings fit into eight key categories using a systematic, qualitative approach called Open Coding. By examining the 'tags' applied to questions, we further find that Xacro problems manifest in a befuddlingly broad set of contexts. This hinders onboarding and complicates system developers' understanding of representations and tools in the Robot Operating System. We aim to provide an empirical grounding that identifies and prioritizes impediments to users of open robotics systems, so that tool designers, teachers, and robotics practitioners can devise ways of improving robot software tooling and education.
DOI:10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9812349