.sdf → .usda
SDF to USD
Convert a robot description from SDF to USD in the browser. Nothing is installed and nothing is queued: the file is read, written in the other format, and handed back with a list of anything that could not be carried across.
Convert a file
Drop your SDF here
Drop the folder too if the model references meshes.
Files are read on our server and deleted after a day. Nothing is published.
Reading the SDF
Writing the USD
Look at the file first
What this conversion costs
These are the things USD has no place for. They are reported on the converted file as well, as a comment at the top, so the file itself says what is missing from it.
- Everything outside the model. SDF describes a world — ground planes, lights, several models, physics settings — and only the robot crosses.
- Plugins. A <plugin> element is a Gazebo executable, not a description, and nothing in USD corresponds to it.
Gazebo to Isaac
Both formats can describe a scene, which is why this direction exists at all — but they agree on almost nothing about how. What is carried is the robot: links with inertia, joints with limits, collision geometry marked as collision.
The two formats
- SDF .sdf
- Gazebo's format, which describes a whole world rather than a single robot.
- USD .usda
- NVIDIA's scene format, where a robot is ordinary geometry with UsdPhysics applied on top — what Isaac Sim opens.
Converting is rarely the whole job. Once you have the USD, the viewer shows what actually came across — collision geometry against visual, joint limits, where the mass sits — and the physics lab answers the question a file cannot: whether the robot stands up when gravity is switched on.