Revision history [back]

Hi Martin, I hope you are doing well !

You have two different ways of achieving what you want:

1. detect urdf_parser using rospack. This tool will give you the compilation and linking flags required to use urdf_parser. The main drawback I see is that RBDL will rely on ROS which is a _huge_ dependency. To do so, you can use this CMake macro: https://github.com/jrl-umi3218/jrl-cmakemodules/blob/master/ros.cmake ...and adapt it to your needs.

2. the second way is more "traditional". Numerous libraries have been integrated into ROS using this scheme. It would be to create a ROS rbld stack containing two packages: one is rbdl a ROS package wrapping your library and the second would be rbdl_bridge another ROS package containing the code required to load a URDF model. In this case, as rbdl_bridge is part of ROS, you can directly depend on urdf_parser using the manifest.xml file.

Personnally, I would go for the second solution which is more modular, avoid coupling tightly RBDL to ROS and would allow you to properly document the ROS integration on the ROS wiki. You could as well release your stack and obtain a Debian package of the RBDL ROS stack which can be installed using apt-get.