Hi everyone,
LinkForge recently passed 5,000 downloads on the Blender Extensions platform, which encouraged me to share a broader idea behind the project rather than just another release announcement.
Over the past year, I’ve been working on LinkForge, which started as a Blender extension for creating robot models. As the project evolved, I realized the more interesting problem wasn’t Blender itself, it was the way we author robot descriptions.
Today, formats like URDF and XACRO often become the project’s source of truth. While they work well as interchange formats, I’ve started to think they behave more like compiled artifacts than true source representations.
That led me to build LinkForge around a programmable Intermediate Representation (IR) that can:
- compose robot models programmatically,
- validate kinematics and physical properties before export,
- and compile to formats such as URDF and XACRO.
The long-term goal isn’t to replace URDF or ROS. Quite the opposite, it’s to provide a tool-agnostic authoring and validation layer that sits before existing ROS workflows.
I’m interested in hearing from the ROS community:
- Do you think robot description workflows are missing an intermediate representation?
- Have you encountered limitations using URDF/XACRO as the primary authoring format?
- How do larger teams currently manage robot descriptions while preserving design intent?
I’d genuinely appreciate feedback, especially from people maintaining complex robots or working on large simulation pipelines.
GitHub: https://github.com/arounamounchili/linkforge
Documentation: https://linkforge.readthedocs.io
