This package includes large data files associated with the Robotics Toolbox for Python (RTB-P).

The data files are provided as a separate package to work around disk space limitations on PyPI. Including these data with the RTB code adds nearly 200MB to every release, which will blow the PyPI limit quite quickly.
Since the data doesn't change very much, it's mostly robot models and a few data sets, it makes sense for it to be a standalone package.

The Toolbox function path_to_datafile(file) will return an absolute Path to file which is relative to the root of the data package. For example

loadmat('data/map1.mat')   # read rtbdata/data/map1.mat
loadmat('foo.dat')         # read ./foo.dat
loadmat('~/foo.dat')       # read $HOME/foo.dat

A matching local file takes precendence over a file in the data package.

You don't need to explicitly install this package, it happens automatically when you when you install RTB-P

pip install roboticstoolbox-python

since it is a dependency.