.urdf → .sdf
URDF to SDF
Convert a robot description from URDF to SDF 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
URDF .urdf SDF .sdf
Drop your URDF 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 URDF
Writing the SDF
Look at the file first
What this conversion costs
These are the things SDF 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.
- Mimic joints. SDF needs a gearbox joint or a plugin to make one joint follow another, and neither is a faithful translation of a mimic tag.
SDF is a world file
It can hold several models, a ground plane, lights and physics settings. A robot converted from URDF becomes one model inside that world.
Poses name the frame they are measured in
Before SDFormat 1.7 every link was placed in the model's frame, and a URDF had to be flattened to fit. This writes 1.9: each joint is placed relative to its parent link and each link relative to the joint that carries it — the same chain URDF means by origin, checked against libsdformat to the last digit.
The two formats
- URDF .urdf
- the ROS description of a robot: links, joints, geometry and inertia, one rigid tree. A URDF file, line by line
- SDF .sdf
- Gazebo's format, which describes a whole world rather than a single robot. SDFormat, explained
Converting is rarely the whole job. Once you have the SDF, 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.