First of all, thank you all for your work on this package.

I have made some modifications, trying out a preliminary implementation 
of XML interface via basic reflection (or maybe just serialization...) 
to accommodate parsing and validating URDF files.
I tried to mimic Gazebo*'s SDF implementation in C++ for native Python code.

I have pushed this code to the forked "reflection" branch: 
https://github.com/eacousineau/robot_model_py
The README.md contains some more detailed info on what was changed.

Can I ask your opinions of this change? Could it potentially be merged in?

Also, is there a reflection / serialization library like this already 
out there for Python?
(I looked around but did not seem to find any. pyxser seems to do direct 
serialization in the sense of pickle. Amara looks like it might be 
promising)

* The newer, non-ROS version: http://gazebosim.org/

- Eric

On 03/29/2012 09:27 AM, Thomas Moulard wrote:
> Sorry for the double post:
> I have merged my package features (pretty printing, loading from the parameter
> server and display_urdf script) into urdf_parser_py.
> It displays fine a custom URDF I use and the PR-2 model.