The robot is together, the depth sensor is working, I’m teleoperating it from my desktop computer…
And what’s the next step?
The URDF file.
Do you know what happens when you ask Cursor to make your URDF file for you the same way it made all the other files?
It gives you the dreaded:
“I’m sorry, Jeff. I’m afraid I cannot do that.”
I admit, I’ve been relying heavily on AI guidance through this whole process. I got coded a single thing and even got it to build me a UI so I don’t have to use the terminal.
I’ve been taking in a lot of theory, but in terms of practical progress, I haven’t been looking further than the very next step.
And so far, that’s worked perfectly fine.
The next step has mostly been: ask Cursor what the next step is, then tell it to do it for me.
But the URDF file is different.
The URDF is the exact dimensions and pivot points of the robot. I’ve got it perfectly modeled in Blender, but there is no magical “export URDF” button that just tells ROS what the dimensions of this robot are.
And I couldn’t find another project with a complete file I could simply reuse.
I found some examples that were helpful, but at the end of the day I’ve got to go through this piece by piece and feed Cursor the exact data it needs to build the file properly. The Cursor can write the file for me, lol!
So after waiting on parts for over a month, during which time I could have been working on this URDF file, now everything is finally physically ready, but I’m learning about collision geometry and inertial tensor matrices.
Cursor swears that once I finish this file, it can do the rest.
We shall see.