Robot description formats and approaches: Review

Modern robotics represents a collaboration between industry and scientific community, with interdisciplinary research being at its forefront. This leads to wide variation in the requirements for robotic systems, which encourages the development and use of different description formats. Currently, some of the existing formats are gaining wide recognition; at the same time, their individual limitations become more apparent. The goal of this work is to generalize the idea of a robot description format, putting together different approaches to representing a robot, including formats that rely on human-readable and binary data representation, formats tied to specific software, and ones that exist independently, and others. We outline the main advantages and limitations of the existing formats, with the aim to make the following efforts at standardization or development more informed.