Q: How to retrieve the robot name from the URDF file?

A: This can be accomplished by loading a URDF file, parsing it and calling the getName() method of the C++ Urdf model.

To see how to load and parse a URDF file, you can follow the Parse a urdf file tutorial  (http://wiki.ros.org/urdf/Tutorials/Parse%20a%20urdf%20file).

After compile the code and generate the executable called “parser” following the “Parse a urdf file” tutorial, you can call it with the path of the URDF file as argument. Something like: rosrun your_package_name parser /path/to/your/file.urdf