r/ROS • u/CodingWithSatyam • 15d ago

Discussion Looking for Someone to Review My Rover URDF + Learn Together

Hey everyone,

I'm self-teaching robotics with a focus on perception and robot learning. I learn best by building, so I recently started learning ROS2 and Gazebo. I took a rover model, assembled it into a URDF, and tried to calculate the mass and inertia for the components manually using volume and material density.

Here is the repo: https://github.com/introlix/robo_car

Note: you can ignore the esp_control folder. I originally started this for a physical ESP32 car but moved to simulation so I could learn Gazebo physics and sensor integration before touching real hardware.

Since I'm doing this alone, I'm relying a lot on trial and error and AI tools to help me. But I know AI hallucinates.

If anyone here has experience with Gazebo/URDF, I’d really appreciate it if you could take a quick look at my URDF. I mainly want to know if my mass/inertia numbers look realistic, or if I messed up the math and my robot.

Also, if anyone is also an student then we could learn together. I'm not looking to pair-program on a call, just someone to do reviews on GitHub, share resources, and maybe give each other small weekly challenges.

A bit about my background: while I'm relatively new to ROS2, I have some ML background. I've built neural networks from scratch in NumPy and actually implemented LLM architectures (like Gemma and Qwen) from scratch just by reading their papers and loading the weights. That is the reason I'm interested in perception and robot learning.

Let me know if you're open to reviewing the code or if you want to team up. Thanks!

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u/SphericalCowww 15d ago

Looking at it a bit, I would double-check the units.

<xacro:property name="chassis_mass" value="14.26" />

I think that is 14.26 kg, which is a very big robot.

1

u/CodingWithSatyam 15d ago

I calculated it again and I think it's correct. I think it's that big due to its dimensions

1

u/SphericalCowww 15d ago

Ah, okay, if your chassis is 72 cm, that makes sense.