Greetings all,

We are releasing today a SolidWorks add-in for conveniently exporting your
assembly/part to URDF that I have developed while an intern at Willow
Garage and the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). The tool provides a
convenient method to export single parts or whole assemblies to URDF
packages. For exporting SolidWorks assemblies, the add-in displays a simple
GUI to configure the links and joints. This configuration can be saved
within the SolidWorks assembly and re-used or updated as you develop your
robot. For single SolidWorks parts, the add-in simply pulls the part's
properties and creates a one-link URDF file. In both cases, it should help
reduce the time and frustration of porting your robot CAD file to URDF for
your ROS and Gazebo needs.

For installation instructions and general information about the exporter,
please see the main documentation page<http://ros.org/wiki/sw_urdf_exporter>
.

There are several tutorials
<http://ros.org/wiki/sw_urdf_exporter/Tutorials> that
explain how to export parts, how to export assemblies and how to better
organize your large assembly for exporting.

If you have questions or trouble using this tool, please post them to ROS
Answers <http://answers.ros.org/questions/> with the tag 'sw_urdf_exporter'
so that everyone can benefit from the response. Questions with this
specific tag are forwarded directly to me, so I will read them regardless.

If you find a bug or have a feature to request, you may post it to the
SolidWorks
to URDF Exporter trac<http://kforge.ros.org/robotmodel/sw_urdf_exporter_trac/>
.

Enjoy!
Stephen