[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [robot description formats] Support the PLY geometry format in URDF

[Garrett Johnson]

Hello! I posted over [in the URDF Github](https://github.com/ros/urdf/issues/12), but this place seems to be a bit more active.

At the moment, the URDF spec only seems to mention Collada / DAE and STL file formats for the mesh node. STL, however, doesn't support a very robust set of data and Collada is pretty inefficient in terms of file size and pretty complicated to export. What are peoples thoughts on including something like the PLY format as an option for a mesh node file format?

- Supports a binary format type, which enables to smaller file sizes.
- Optionally supports texture coordinates so the `<texture>` tag can be used for a surface texture.
- Optionally supports normals and vertex colors (and any other custom vertex attribute) for other color and shading.
- Extremely simple to write an importer / exporter for.

Thoughts? Thanks!
Garrett





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