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You might want to check out a submission to the ROS 3D contest: Automatic Calibration of the 3D pose of the Kinect with respect to the robot base. Uses fast ICP to track the 3D pose of the Kinect, then uses a global optimization to retrieve the static transformation. (http://www.ros.org/wiki/openni/Contests/ROS%203D/Automatic%20Calibration%20of%20Extrinsic%20Parameters)

This should help you get an initial guess between your base link and kinect. So that you can start making a URDF.

Then you might want to look at this tutorial: How to learn kinematic models of articulated objects only by using a webcam and a laptop. (http://www.ros.org/wiki/articulation_tutorials/Tutorials/ArticulationWebcamDemo)

Which might help you finish making your URDF.

Another approach might be to use the ar_pose package to determine the rough locations of each joint in the camera frame and then use those measurements to construct a URDF.

Unfortunately people typically get out a ruler and just measure these things because it is faster and in general more accurate.