Over the years I’ve attempted to convert a dozen or so CAD files to URDF and this has consistently been a struggle, with any tool. Doing it by hand is sometimes the fastest and definitely the most consistent approach, but also tedious and annoying to change.
The Onshape-to-robot tool simply doesn’t work for more complicated robots (like the NASA-JPL Open-Source Rover) and the Onshape plugin that someone launched about a year back never even loaded for me.
For the entrepreneurial I would even go as far to say: Please take my money (we all know us roboticists are famously stubborn in doing everything themselves so hopefully this means something)
I’ve been working on a central repository for CAD to URDF conversion over the weekend
This is all so that the ability to convert to URDF isn’t scattered across the internet, with projects being left unmaintained.
Is there any guarantee that you can keep maintaining this over the next 5 years or that the community will? I definitely applaud the effort, but open-source projects often get abandoned shortly after seeing the light.
This should be core to ROS 2 in my opinion, because without CAD to URDF, writing a complex URDF by hand is cumbersome.
Couldn’t agree more. I would even think this deserves a working group.