[Release] LinkForge v1.4.0: A Programmable Robot Description Engine (URDF/SRDF)

Hi ROS Community,

We’re excited to announce LinkForge v1.4.0, a major architectural update that transforms LinkForge into a programmable Intermediate Representation (IR) for robot descriptions.

If you’ve ever debugged a crash in Gazebo caused by a bad inertia tensor, or spent hours manually resolving namespace collisions in URDFs and MoveIt 2 SRDFs when attaching a manipulator to a mobile base, this is built for you.

Key Features for ROS Developers:

  • Lossless URDF/XACRO Parsing: Preserves unknown metadata/tags, allowing seamless round-trips.
  • Automated SRDF & MoveIt 2: Programmatically compose subsystems and LinkForge will automatically merge planning groups and self-collision matrices into a unified SRDF.
  • ROS 2 Control & Gazebo: Auto-generates ros2_control hardware interface tags based on high-level Python definitions.
  • Physical Linter: Calculates rigorous inertia tensors from geometry and catches non-physical masses before you launch your simulation.

We’d love the community’s feedback on how well it integrates with your existing ROS 1 / ROS 2 workflows!

GitHub: LinkForge
Pypi: pip install linkforge-core