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

[Garrett Johnson]

> in some testing I did a few months ago it turned out that you can use just about anything that Assimp supports for meshes in urdfs

Great! That's more or less what I was expecting. So it sounds like this is more a matter of documentation than anything else. Unless there's a serious reason not to expand the documented mesh formats, this could be as simple as just adding an extension to the list on the URDF wiki page!

> Collada has a variant where the whole file is compressed using gzip, the extension changes to .zae and it typically results in 90% reduction in file size.

I'd heard of `zae` before, but it also wasn't listed on the URDF wiki as a suitable format. I'd say it's worth adding that, as well, if it's considered a valid format. In a quick test, it looks like PLY is able to get down a bit lower than the zipped collada file, but I understand what you're getting at.

The reason I'm asking for documentation updates is because, like I said, we're looking into generating URDF models and visualizing them in the browser and other platforms outside of ROS because it's a nice, documented, and standard format that's easy to parse and export. I feel that the density, robustness, and simplicity of use of the PLY format scratches that last itch that isn't afforded by the other two mesh formats. I'm open to other format suggestions that scratch that, too, though!

Overall I'm pretty happy with URDF -- I'm just trying to help the standard grow in a couple ways that accomodate my use cases! Especially if there's not a lot of work investment to make it happen.

Thanks for your feedback!
Garrett





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