The Husky is Clearpath’s rugged, mid-size unmanned ground vehicle — a four-wheel skid-steer platform built to handle rough outdoor terrain, widely used across robotics research for navigation, mapping, and field-robotics work where a wheeled base needs to survive gravel, grass, and mud rather than a clean lab floor.
The mechanism
Four wheels, each independently driven, give the Husky four degrees of freedom —
it steers by skid-steer, varying left-side vs. right-side wheel speed rather than
through a steering joint, the same driving principle as a tracked vehicle or a
wheelchair. All four wheel joints are continuous, no mimic joints, no closed loops.
The chassis itself carries a dedicated inertial_link with the vehicle’s real lumped
mass and inertia tensor, separate from the visual body shell — a common convention for
wheeled-base URDFs, not a sign of missing data.
About these files — read before importing
This is not a URDF. Clearpath publishes Husky as a parameterized .urdf.xacro
template with an extensive menu of optional sensors and mounts (lasers, cameras,
LiDAR) toggled by environment variables, all defaulting off. This gallery entry
links directly to the official husky/husky
repository, unmodified, with every optional accessory left at its default (off) —
what you get is the bare Husky chassis. ARMOR expands the macros itself after
downloading, so Open in ARMOR gives you a working robot — nothing here is a
pre-baked derivative of Clearpath’s files.