.xacro → .urdf
Xacro to URDF
Convert a robot description from Xacro to URDF 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 Xacro here
Include the files it pulls in — select them all at once, or drop the whole folder.
Files are read on our server and deleted after a day. Nothing is published.
Reading the Xacro
Writing the URDF
Look at the file first
What this conversion costs
Nothing structural. Every bundled sample — a six-axis arm, a gripper, a generic quadruped and the Unitree A1 at 23 links — came through this direction with its links, joints, geometry and inertia intact. Your model may still hit something these do not cover, and if it does the converted file will say so at the top.
This is expansion, not conversion
Xacro is URDF with macros. Expanding it is what every ROS launch file does at startup, and the result is the plain URDF underneath.
Includes and macros are followed
The Unitree A1's description is seven files that include one another and build four legs from one macro. Expanded here it comes out at 23 links and 22 joints — the same robot as the plain URDF the vendor ships.
Missing files are named, not skipped quietly
If an include cannot be found, the robot you get is short of everything that file defined. We list each one instead of handing you a robot with three links and no explanation.
The two formats
- Xacro .xacro
- URDF with macros, properties and includes — expanded before anything can read it.
- URDF .urdf
- the ROS description of a robot: links, joints, geometry and inertia, one rigid tree.
Converting is rarely the whole job. Once you have the URDF, 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.