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Since Gazebo is deprecating URDF and moving to SDF, it seems like ROS might follow suit.

hm, I am not aware of such deprecation. Can you point me to the originating source of that news? Thanks.

Is URDF depricated, or about to be?

No. The reason being URDF is still useful for things outside of simulation. SDF tools / Gazebo will continue to parse URDF formats.

If so are there tools which work with SDF?

If so, I am not aware of them yet.

For instance will robot_state_publisher be able to handle SDF defined robots?

Not that I am aware of. Though a good starting point is a feature request on an issue tracker :)

If not, should we be sticking to using URDF for defining our robot models?

Yes. You can always use gzsdf print or gz sdf -p (gazebo 3.x) to convert URDF to SDF.

But there may be reasons to use SDF if the project is simulation specific or will not rely on existing ROS tools?

Kurt,

If you want to see more examples / tutorials in URDF, please comment/up-vote this issue: https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo_models/issue/16/create-more-urdf-examples

Thanks.