Onshape URDF Exporter Documentation

Onshape URDF Exporter is a tool that that exports Onshape robot designs as URDF files. These files can be used with tools like RViz or Gazebo to calculate inverse kinematics, run physics simulations, and provide visualizations.

This project is based on onshape-to-robot, but with some different design decisions and a number of bug fixes:

• This tool focuses on doing one thing well: Exporting URDFs

• XML document creation is done using Python’s XML library, fixing a number of bugs related to characters not being properly escaped

• Files created by this tool always have valid filenames, even on Windows

• Uses Open3D for STL simplification instead of MeshLab, which makes installation easier

• Uses YAML files for configuration, instead of the non-standard commentjson format

• Onshape URDF Exporter GitHub repository

• Onshape URDF Exporter on PyPI

Contents:

• Installation & requirements
  • Requirements
  • Installation
  • Setting up your API key
• Design-time considerations
  • Specifying degrees of freedom
  • Inverting axis orientation
  • Naming links
  • Adding custom frames in your model
  • Joint frames
• Handling Kinematic Loops
  • Introduction
  • Using Onshape URDF Exporter
  • Handling constraints on execution time
• Export your own robot (writing config.yaml)
  • config.yaml entries
  • Example config.yaml file