The UR5e is Universal Robots’ signature collaborative robot — the one most people picture when they hear “cobot.” Six revolute joints in series give it a full six degrees of freedom, enough to reach an arbitrary pose in its workspace without redundancy. It ships with force/torque-limited joints and rounded, pinch-point-free geometry so it can work directly alongside people without a safety cage, the defining trait of the whole collaborative-robot category UR pioneered.
The mechanism
Base, shoulder, upper arm, forearm, and three wrist joints (wrist 1/2/3) form a
textbook 6-axis serial arm — no mimic joints, no closed loops, every movable joint an
independent actuator. base_link_inertia is a small internal frame Universal Robots’
own description inserts to align the visual/physical model with the real controller’s
coordinate convention (REP-103 vs. the arm’s native frame); it isn’t a seventh axis.
About these files — read before importing
This is not a URDF. Universal Robots publishes UR arms as a parameterized .urdf.xacro
template shared across every model in the e-Series lineup (UR3e through UR20) — model
identity comes entirely from which ur_type config files get loaded, not a separate
file per robot. This gallery entry links directly to the official
Universal_Robots_ROS2_Description
repository, configured for ur5e, unmodified. ARMOR expands the macros itself after
downloading, so Open in ARMOR gives you a working robot — nothing here is a
pre-baked derivative of Universal Robots’ files.