sdformat tools

Sdformat (SDF) is used by Gazebo simulator to describe simulated robots and simulated environment (sim world). As ROS users, we know URDF is more common to describe robot's geometry, kinematic and dynamic properties in ROS community, which is used by many ROS applications like rviz, moveit, robot_state_publisher.

this package provides some easy, convenient and flexible tools to help us make the best use of SDF in ROS community:

xmacro4sdf: write modular SDF xml by using macro (not nest model) , refer to xmacro.
sdf2urdf: convert SDF to URDF with some limitation.
urdf_generator: urdf utility class (support sdf2urdf, merge).

a workflow of using SDF in ROS community with these tools:

Usage

Installation

pip install xmacro
# cd src of ros workspace
git clone https://github.com/gezp/sdformat_tools.git
# cd ros workspace
colcon build

xmacro4sdf

xmacro4sdf model.sdf.xmacro

sdf2urdf

sdf2urdf model.sdf

urdf_generator

from sdformat_tools.urdf_generator import UrdfGenerator

urdf_generator = UrdfGenerator()
urdf_generator.parse_from_sdf_file(robot_sdf_path)
urdf_generator.remove_joint('world_joint')
urdf_generator.extend_urdf_file(control_urdf_path)
robot_urdf_xml = urdf_generator.to_string()