Move URDF specification to a Github repo?

[traversaro]

I think this has been already discussed in the past, but I could not find an issue tracking explicitly this.

As the URDF spec is moving towards support an explicit versioning of the spec (at least this is what I understood from ros/urdfdom#133 and #59), I think it would be great to have some way to separate the specification of the URDF format as defined until now, and future versions of the spec. Furthermore, it would be great to have a single place where discuss new features of the URDF spec, instead of using issues in the repos that implement the specification (as now it happens with https://github.com/ros/urdfdom_headers and https://github.com/ros/urdfdom).

A possible solution that would not take a lot of effort would be to create a GitHub repo to host the specifications, so that release and improvements can be handled with the usual GitHub tools (such as tag/releases, pull requests, issues). To start with a minimum viable example, we can just convert the existing URDF wiki pages to documents stored in a GitHub repo (in a format such as Markdown, reStructuredText or AsciiDoc).

If the URDF mantainers agree on this, if necessary I would be happy to volunteer to handle the migration of the contents from the ROS wiki to a repo.

[traversaro]

FYI @scpeters @EricCousineau-TRI @clalancette @davetcoleman @jmirabel @rhaschke @tfoote @Levi-Armstrong

[EricCousineau-TRI]

Would love to see this no longer be hosted on the Wiki!

FTR, I felt extremely dirty making this modification:
ros/urdfdom#138 (comment)

[davetcoleman]

Makes sense to me.

Mostly unrelated: I wrote a Wikipedia article for URDF recently but it was rejected for not being notable enough. I haven't tried to find better, more notable sources yet.

[traversaro]

Mostly unrelated: I wrote a Wikipedia article for URDF recently but it was rejected for not being notable enough. I haven't tried to find better, more notable sources yet.

Extremely unrelated: Not sure if it will be helpful with Wikipedia, but whenever I want to introduce URDF to a non-robotics audience arguing that has been adopted (even without a formal specification), I typically mention:

• Its use in Boston Dynamics' Spot SDK (https://github.com/boston-dynamics/spot-sdk/blob/eb4c54c357b4f1e60e6cfeacb7a58b47f6dcef4e/docs/concepts/robot_services.md#robot-state), and everybody knows Boston Dynamics from their videos
• Support in MATLAB (https://en.mathworks.com/help/physmod/sm/ug/urdf-model-import.html) but that was already part of the Wikipedia article
• Probably also the use of URDF in NASA (https://github.com/gkjohnson/nasa-urdf-robots) is useful for name dropping.

In more academic contexts it would be good have something with a DOI (such that we can clearly track references to it) such as conference paper, a RAL paper or even just a JOSS paper. Once you have something cited by ~200/300 scientific papers, it will be hard that someone will claim that is not notable. This is probably valid for SDF as well.

[davetcoleman]

I did cite my JOSS paper in the original Wikipedia article. However their feedback:

that is, they do not show significant coverage (not just passing mentions) about the subject in published, reliable, secondary sources that are independent of the subject

[traversaro]

Sorry, I meant a paper about URDF format itself, so that other papers can mention it and anyone can get a list of academic papers that cite it (and so probably use/refer to URDF), not just of a single paper that uses URDF.
For an example of such a paper for another interchange format (even if from another domain), see https://scholar.google.it/scholar?cluster=4866501840925083828&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 for the Functional Mock-up Interface

[ros-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on ROS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.ros.org/t/urdf-improvements/30520/17